Sarah Jamison Sexton - Whitman Jamison Bush name confusion

Many people who do internet genealogy are amateurs, hobby genealogists who don't know the value of documented sources. They are using family lore to write their versions of their family histories.

With the ease of internet searches, they see someone else's work and freely borrow from it, often without checking the veracity of the other person's work. One mistake can be copied 10, 20, 50 times until it is "generally accepted as fact" because it has appeared so often. Yes, I do agree that's it's an annoying practice. Frustrating, too, for those who want to find the true answers about their ancestors.

It's better here on Geni because we have collaborative genealogy. We share what we know. We also question each other when the facts just don't add it. It's easy to add documents that verify facts for our ancestors. When there's a question, that's when the corps of volunteer curators can be helpful.

Curators also have the ability to create "Master Profiles" or MP's wherever in the tree the curators are working. That MP badge means that someone verified key data points on that profile or in his/her lineage. It also gives Geni members a contact person if they have questions about the profile.

Now, since our merger with MyHeritage, there is an enhancement for finding those critical source documents that do verify data on the profiles. It's a service that not everyone can afford, but for those who have signed up, we are getting very good feedback. I know I've found very helpful information using it.

Thanks for writing, Gary. If you have a particular profile that needs help, look to see if a curator is among the co-managers and send an inbox message to him/her. Curators will do their human best to assist you.

Maria Edmonds-Zediker
Volunteer Curator

PS - Gary, please don't put your email address in public discussions. We would hate to see you hacked. If someone needs to contact you via email, they will ask and you can send it through the more secure inbox system.

Gary

Such great points.

The other day a Geni member asked profile collaborators:

"doesn't it seem odd that a woman born in North Carolina, died in Tennessee, seems to have parents, born and died in Connecticut?"

So I looked to see where that profile might have originated - and sure enough, it was not a Geni error or anything like that. There were at least a dozen on line trees with that info.

On Geni, as people work on sections of the "world family tree," we can spot, correct and source out these myths, mixups & sheer logical fallacies for everyone else.

It's such great work.