ROOTS & BRANCHES

Last week’s “Roots & Branches” began a journey backward in time – all the way back to 1991, when I first was the instructor for a continuing education class on genealogy.

Neither the Internet nor DNA were a thing.

But one thing I do recall telling the students in that class was that genealogy could be like a child’s game of “rumor” (sometimes also called “telephone”), in which one researcher passes on unsourced information to a second researcher, who then passes on the same information to a third and – you get the idea … the information doesn’t get any more credible in the process and, indeed, can often get misconstrued or otherwise mangled into something bearing little resemblance to its beginning point.

At that prehistoric-seeming time when I first taught the course, the prime offenders abetting this game of rumor were people who drew their genealogy straight from county biographical histories and surname books, both of which were notorious for being lightly sourced and often filled with erroneous history crafted from one tale of oral family lore after another.

In a Lebanon County biographical history, an extensive sketch of the Kreiser family’s first couple of generations in America was again put into print by a family reunion that had no regard for the actual documents that showed even a different first name for the immigrant!

I’ll see say now as I said then – when you closely examine family legends, it’s rare that they have absolutely no kernel of truth. It’s equally true, however, that these tales get every fact correct.

One of my best examples has come from the family of my late former mother-in-law. The family name in the current generations is Tobin, a common enough surname from the British Isles. There was a “crazy family story” that the immigrant was really a Polish Jew named Tobinsky. Research showed an eastern European origin and a name similar to Tobinsky, with the religious background not confirmed.

The Internet has created the classic two-edged sword by speeding the transmission of genealogical information.

No more waiting months or even years for a query placed in a genealogical journal to be answered. Electronic message boards often made communication immediate (as well as making the acronym SASE – short for “self-addressed stamped envelope,” the common courtesy enclosed when sending someone a letter asking for info).

But as advantageous as such instantaneous communication is, the downside is that bad information can be spread just as quickly. The old game of rumor was now put on a mega-dose of steroids.

This is especially true when beginners often put together records referring to similarly named people (or people they only even think are similarly named – don’t get me started about people without knowledge of German given name traditions).

In the old days (and didn’t you know I’d use that phrase as some point?), most genealogists either visited or did a bit of studying about the history of an ancestral area remote to them. While today’s Internet tools would theoretically make that easier, many desktop genealogists just hammer together what I call “carpenter trees” – several records nailed together by force of will but not any historical logic.

Many of them haven’t even attempted to do an inventory of what they know and what’s in their attic – which is what we’ll talk about in the next “Roots & Branches.”