Genealogy Chat

Absolutely right, Jennifer. It is okay to use submitted records as a bit of a clue as to where to look, but they always need checking against the parish registers to be verified. I have found some absolutely rubbish on there, for example people getting married 50 years before they were born. If the record is correct and the person submitting it has got the information from a primary source (such as a parish register for a place that is not on the IGI) then it should be easy to check it out. If not, then you never know where the information came from and should disregard it.

I tend to disregard anything on the IGI that has member submitted on it. I might add it as a note to follow up but not take it as gospel. I mentioned recently a guy had submitted his tree on there and basically he had lifted all of my tree back from his ancestor because it seemed to fit! I did contact this chap and point out that his ancestor would have been 6 months old when she married to be able to fit into my line. I told him just buying her marriage cert would have shown him who her father was and he wouldnt have got confused and followed my line. His reply was 'Oh I am just doing this for a bit of interest for my sons, I dont actually want to spend any money on it!!'

Beware of information found on the Ancestral File of the LDS site. There is a warning to the effect that it 'has not been verified against any official records '. I found someone had traced a branch of my family tree many generations back and was really excited. I found the same information on Roots web and Ancestry,com , so thought it credible. However the names and places didn't match with the censuses . So I checked who had submitted the infomation on Ancestral File and found it was the same person who had put it on the other sites. Official sources are the most reliable , and it pays to double check every source.