The Gifts and Shadows of Online Family Trees

At its heart, family history is about stories. Stories of the family we know, the family that we have a vague idea about, and the sometimes very distant family we never knew we had.

Before we had the written word, there was oral history: the sharing of stories from one generation to the next, kept alive by family elders, early record keepers, or royal genealogists.

As we learned to write and create permanent records, royalty and the wealthy began to record their family trees in beautifully designed charts and calligraphy. While memory and stories had always been trusted and revered, now people had something tangible to pass down through the generations.

The printing press was invented, and family histories and genealogies were no longer just available to the families they belonged to, but to anyone who could access a book or a library.

A More Personal Way of Sharing

By the time the 1980’s arrived – when I was discovering the joys and challenges of tracing my family history – one such publication was the GRD: the Genealogical Research Directory. This publication listed thousands of people researching their families. It provided the names of the families they were researching, and most importantly, how to contact them (usually by snail mail).

This, too, was a form of sharing. The process went something like this – you would send a letter to someone listed in the GRD, make a connection, share what you knew about your family, and ask for stories about their family in return. In most instances, you would receive a letter back sharing more information, and a relationship would start to form. I’m still in contact with a couple of people I first connected with through the GRD!

There was a level of trust in the accuracy of the information that was shared – someone was sharing with you their own research, what they knew, what they didn’t know, and in many cases, they would also share copies of documents and hand-drawn family trees. It was personal and human.

When Sharing Changed

Then came the internet. Sites such as WikiTree, Geneanet, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch gave people the opportunity to share their trees and research with the world. No personal connection (other than an internet connection) required.

What a treasure trove of information. What a gift for those of us trying to find distant relatives to help build out our family trees.

But with gifts come shadows. In our excitement, it became tempting to place as much trust in the accuracy of these publicly available trees as we did in the trees and information we shared with those with whom we had built a personal connection.

Sometimes that trust is warranted, and sometimes it is not.

The names sound right, the dates match, and so we add this new information to our tree without pausing to question it or without really checking it. We graft new branches onto our tree, branches that don’t truly belong.

At times, it can feel as though we are losing the essence of family history. Instead of sharing stories, we are collecting information – and sometimes that information is not connected to our family at all.

All this is not to say that we should ignore the family trees we find online - they are a gift. We just need to be judicious in how we use that gift.

How I Approach Online Trees

Personally, I get very excited when I see a tree that looks like it might be a branch of my own tree. My approach is to pause, explore, and ask myself some questions:

• Has the creator noted any sources on their tree? Where did this information come from?

• Is there internal consistency? A tree I recently looked at had a birth year of 1858 for someone who married in 1870, which would have made him 12 years old when he married. According to the tree, his mother was born in 1846, which would have made her 12 years old when she gave birth. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely.

• Are there other trees that appear to have exactly the same information? Sometimes this can be an indicator that many people have grafted the same information from an external source to their own tree.

• Is any of the information in the tree factually and evidentially incorrect? Once, I found a photograph attached to someone’s tree purporting to be my Great Great Aunt. I knew for a fact it was my Great Grandmother, as my Grandmother had given me the same photograph many years before. If something so fundamental is incorrect in a tree, what else might be wrong?

• When was the creator last active on the site? If recently, could I reach out?

If, after asking myself these questions, I feel that the tree could be part of my family, I reach out to the creator and ask to share stories. I build a relationship, explore possibilities, and together we uncover whether or not our families truly share a history.

The family trees we find online are a gift - people generously sharing what they know about their families. Use them like the GRD: a starting point that, with proper care and human connection, can lead to sharing stories that might help expand your understanding of your own family.