There, I said it and I'm glad.
I am the amateur genealogist in our family. My Family Tree Maker file has nearly 3,500 names in it what with all the aunts and uncles and in-laws and offspring and second cousins three times removed and all. I admit it. I do enjoy learning about relatives and even relatives of relatives. It's like a sickness, an itch that can't be scratched.
So I dig through online census pages and as many free things as I can find. I'm often tempted to break down and spend actual money to be able to look at old newspaper obituaries and ship passenger manifests and other stuff of which I am not even aware, but so far I have resisted the urge. I am nothing if not thrifty. Frugal. Okay, cheap.
In the meantime, it's an engaging hobby, but I have found that the site Find-A-Grave has bad information mixed in with the good and it's impossible to tell which is which unless you already know the truth.
Case in point: There's some accurate information about my stepmother, Mildred Louise Williams Houston Brague Fuller, such as her date and place of birth, date of death, and place of burial, and even a photograph of her headstone, but then it goes off the rails with erroneous information about her parents. Find-A-Grave says Mildred's parents were Charles Erasmus Williams and Maud Lee Gamewell, and that is just plain wrong, Wrong, WRONG. I knew her father, Russell Sterling Williams, Sr., personally and his second wife, Virginia, whom he married after his first wife, Pearl Cannon, died. I happen to know for a fact that the mother of Russ's 11 children was Pearl Cannon. Russ and Pearl's offspring were Cleo and Mildred and John and Margaret and Kenneth (who died in infancy) and Russ, Jr., and Marvin and Billy and Faye and Freddie and Sue. I knew all of them except Kenneth. How can Find-A-Grave be so right at times and then so wrong at other times? And what is even more important, how can researchers trust what they find if they also find information they know is not true?
Furthermore, while it is apparently very easy to enter erroneous information into Find-A-Grave, it is very difficult to get it corrected. I stay exasperated.
Another case in point: I found information about my biological father, who is buried at a certain cemetery in New Jersey. Find-A-Grave's page has his written information correct, but the photograph of his supposed grave is not his at all; it is actually another person with the same first and last name but a different middle initial, with different birth and death dates, and who -- if you do a little digging (no pun intended) -- is buried in a different cemetery in a different town.
My stepmother Mildred is probably unique in that all three of her three husbands are buried around her. Find-A-Grave, however, lists a fourth husband out of the blue that none of us have ever heard of, an obvious mistake.
I wish people who think they are helping would do a little more research and verify their information before they publish it for the world to see.
And I hesitate to pay money to access information when the free information cannot be trusted to be accurate.
Would you?
