Concept of Facts

Are you suggesting that Truth isn't just what your contemporaries let you get away with? :-)

Interesting article, good on the historical background but veers into dubious territory when it turns into a political polemic.

There's nothing political in what is written, just a statement and analysis of what happened in February with the travel ban, which seems to confirm the ideas of the writer.

Personally, I liked Justin's point better than the article.

I thought that as independent entities both were strong but that the link between them was rather tenuous.

As for the political tone it seemed rather "factual" to me, if you will pardon the pun.

I like that Justin puts a focus on the issue of tradition v. fact. My own profile has 64,000+ ancestors attributed to it. I often wonder hoe many of those links are only "traditional". :)

Interesting article, if a little philosophical but a handy corrective in our post-truth times!!

Justin makes good points though about taking information that has been passed to you as fact. I've even stumbled across someone sourcing their information to a mysterious man they once met who based their statements on unspecified sources! That is clearly ridiculous and should be consigned to the bin, but more dangerous are what appear to be reliable sources but are largely just vanity pieces designed to fancy up some important individual's ancestry. I've found some of Burke's early books to have some very dodgy claims that don't stand up to scrutiny.

There is a good example with my mother's maiden name, where all the previous research has had to be unpicked and re-examined (DNA evidence is already tending to support a Norman origin, even if I doubt we'll ever be able to claim the wonderfully named Baldric le Teuton!):

http://www.patrickcomerford.com/2015/02/the-comerfords-in-ireland-d...

However, it needn't just be older claims. When I first started drawing together the family tree, a number of my paternal first cousins were able to give me a really solid start that they'd spent a lot of time, effort and money pulling together. We took that ball and ran with it, only to uncover evidence that completely undermined everything and we had to throw away pretty much everything we knew about both my paternal grandfather and grandmother and start again. Fortunately, we were able to pool our data and finally pin my paternal grandfather down and push the tree back on his side.

Now I'm perfectly happy with it now and am very confident we have it right this time, but the moral of this post seems to be trust no-one else's research until you've pretty much thrown it all out of the window and started from scratch. So perhaps some future descendant will have to do this all over again, but then again it is always good to have someone check your homework for errors! I just hope we haven't gone too wrong. Fingers crossed DNA tests will help to nail everything down as I get first and second cousins tested and then start hunting down the more elusive third cousins (with my Irish heritage, it has proved tricky but I have a papertrail on one side of the family to living people, even if I have yet to track them down in person).

Bill, I understand what you went through with all that. Hearing the family stories that came down to me when I started, it's very clear that I have a number of ancestors who thought a well-told story was better than mere fact ;)

When I posted this link I wasn't thinking so much about recent stories, though. I was thinking about all those fantastic genealogies that suddenly emerge in 15th and 16th century Europe that pretend to make genealogical connections hundreds and thousands of years before that. We'll be fighting them on Geni to the end of time because so many people don't understand that our ancestors who told those stories weren't interested in facts.

I'm a little disappointed that some people lost their focus and got distracted by the politics. The point was so much bigger than that.

Justin, the interesting thing was that the family stories turned out to be right and helped us finally resolve this issue - it was the more recent family research that tried to hammer a square peg through a round hole!

The main earlier problems I run into are from Victorians paying to get themselves a fancy family, then publishing the book which now often turns up on Archive.org and gets mistaken for a reliable source.

People trying to get their family tree back to Jesus, Priam of Troy or Aram and Eve are easier to raise a quizzical eyebrow to.