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Archiver > NORCAL > 1998-02 > 0886385307


From: Gail Howard <>
Subject: Re: Just the Facts!!
Date: Sun, 01 Feb 1998 21:08:27 -0500


Rayburn Killion wrote:
>
>
> Mr. Crookston wrote:
> >It has been my experience that too many a person now engaged in the
> pursuit of
> >genealogy, rarely, if ever, does much primary source research. They
> keep repeating
> >the information they have found in secondary, primarily library
> sources, and now the
> >InterNet sources, which in turn have been taken from secondary
> sources. As you have
> >indicated, about three evolutions of these notations from three
> separate secondary
> >sources about any particular event seems to indicate proof of fact to
> many researches.
> >Never mind that the original quotation may have been an inaccurate
> interpretation in
> >the first place, of the first source.
> >
>
> Here is a good example of just what can happen to the unwary Internet
> researcher. This is a note from one BALL researcher to another
> regarding a website that made some extraordinary claims:
>
> Thanks for keeping me posted. I did in fact go to that Gendex site
> and had a bit of a chuckle. The person who posted it, or whoever did
> the "research", worked quite hard at it. In fact, I saw members of
> the Fairfax, Middlesex, and Lancaster Ball families all represented
> and intertwined. The amazing part of that is there is no known
> relationship among them.
>
> I've spent a long time researching the Middlesex Ball family, many
> of whom had settled in Fauquier Co. VA dating from the mid-to-late
> colonial period. In order to decipher who was who, I often found it
> necessary to look into the other Ball families.
>
> The BALL surname is one of the most researched in history due to
> George Washington's mother being from the Lancaster line. Everybody
> and his uncle wanted to connect. On top of that, General Washington
> was known to have greeted anyone with the surname as "cousin". He
> knew quite well what he was doing. It was a wonderful recruiting
> tool! The BALL surname was quite common at that time, not unlike
> SMITH and JONES today. There were unrelated Ball families from New
> England to the Carolinas. That unquestionably gave rise to the "Three
> Brothers" story that will drive a serious researcher nuts.
>
> It's sad to see that Gendex web site with that information posted as
> it tends to perpetuate many errors. That's not the only place you
> will find such errors though. The 'LDS Family Search' and 'World
> Family Tree' are full of them. In this case, computer technology is
> doing us a dis-service. It's inevitable though and many of these
> errors have been sourced directly from earlier DAR memberships. Some
> of those have even cited Haden's "Virginia Genealogies". Suffice to
> say that the DAR today is much more careful, and Haden is not
> acceptable. Interesting, but not acceptable.
> There's more but you get the idea. The above was written by a man
> named Jim Ball who has done a lot of primary source research. People
> like Jim and a lot of the folks on the Norcal list are the important
> resource on the internet for those genealogy hobbyists (like me) who
> don't have the time, the means, or the expertise to do the down and
> dirty work. And it's good to remember that the hobbyist should be
> encouraged and guided, not scorned or disparaged; plenty of advances
> in many fields have been made by amateurs. ---Ray
Ray,

Forgive me, but I have found and corrected erroneous DAR records. As an
inactive DAR who helped a wonderful DAR Registrar I saw many errors
being perpetuated. There are still files with errors in them. I
reiterate - it is no different on the internet than the physical world,
only faster. The INDIVIDUAL is responsible for checking and proving
information to his or her own satisfaction. If one chooses to hire
someone else to do primary source lookups, that is fine.

Gail

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