Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I get a lot of people who tell me they enjoy these columns. Many people are interested in finding out more. And they often contact me and ask something like, ”So how do I find this stuff online?”
Short answer: You don’t.

Slightly longer answer, because I have a column to fill: I don’t do this kind of research online, because it’s not thorough or accurate enough for what I want to accomplish. Yes, I am aware of the existence of Ancestry, Findagrave, and similar sites, but I’m not much of a fan. Again, because I have a column to write, I’m going to spend about the next six hundred words explaining why.

Let’s say you have a financial question. You’re looking for a way to increase your income. You walk down the street, questioning people about it, until some random yokel suggests you put all your money in whale oil futures. So you run immediately to the bank, withdraw everything, and sink it into whale oil.

Does this sound even remotely plausible to you? Of course it doesn’t. You’d be nuts if you tried it. And yet, add a computer and people do this every day.

First off, I’m going to point out that you don’t know who the information is coming from, or how reliable they are. Let’s take Wikipedia, for instance—The general public can edit it. Now, the general public also consists of those people in front of you in the checkout line who can’t figure out how to use their own credit cards, therefore, so much for trusting Wikipedia as a source. That’s one of the problems with online research—-Most of the information you find was posted by strangers, who could either be reliable researchers or lunatics, and it’s a toss-up which.

I will grant you, sometimes they’ll post the source material, too, which is useful. Often on some of these sites, you can see a documents, scanned and shared—A newspaper article, a government certificate, something like that. And I’ll admit that’s a good idea, and helps to assure accuracy.

It also brings some of the old family-story crazies out of the woodwork.

Believe it or not, there are some people who have nothing better to do than argue and bicker over details of their family history. Generally, their only proof is “My grandpa told me when I was six.” These people will take an old, unprovable family story and defend it tirelessly, in the face of all reason. Evidence doesn’t matter to them, documentation doesn’t matter to them. The only thing they are convinced by is the story they were told decades ago, which they cannot prove, but they don’t care. I’ve told some of these people that they can go and argue with the document that disproves them, but that seems to do no good.

As you can probably tell, I have been attacked by a few of these, over the years. Of course I am not bitter about it.
What do these people have to do with digital research? Well, essentially this: Have you ever seen an internet post that people are NOT willing to argue over? A lot of these sites, including some of the most popular ones (Cough, Ancestry) allow people to make their own changes. If you really want to see your family history changed and adjusted to suit someone else’s garbage rumors, then online research is the place for you.

I’m not completely against everything online (Though to the casual observer, it may seem that way.) Most of my cool sweatshirts, I order from Amazon. I communicate with Facebook as much as anyone else. But I think that some things belong in the realm of actual documentation, and historic research is one of those things.

Turn it off—That’s my advice. If you want to do the sort of historic research I do, then turn off your devices and do it for real. Come see me—I’ll even show you how.