{"id":1467,"date":"2018-04-13T17:35:11","date_gmt":"2018-04-14T00:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1467"},"modified":"2018-04-13T18:08:03","modified_gmt":"2018-04-14T01:08:03","slug":"why-youll-never-be-a-good-genealogist-if-you-dont-collaborate-with-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1467","title":{"rendered":"Why you’ll never be a good genealogist if you don’t collaborate with others"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>There are a lot of people who claim to be good genealogists but really are not.\u00a0 These are folks who publicly gripe about collaborative genealogy sites like Geni.com<\/a>.\u00a0 They claim to be interested in accuracy, but really they only care about pretending to know more than everyone else.\u00a0 Collaborative genealogy threatens them because it makes obvious how much these self-proclaimed experts are missing.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to think of yourself as a great genealogist if you don’t really care about what you don’t know. But genealogy should be all about finding out new things.\u00a0 Time and time again I hear people claim that their private trees are more accurate, but when push comes to shove and they show me them, they are not more accurate, just woefully incomplete.<\/p>\n

If you start from the principle that every person you add to your family tree should have as complete a tree as possible, you quickly realize that this means spidering out in all directions.\u00a0 Your sister-in-law needs her parents and siblings.\u00a0 Those siblings need their spouses.\u00a0 Those spouses need their parents and siblings.\u00a0 And so it goes in all directions.<\/p>\n

The number of people within just a few steps of you is overwhelming.\u00a0 A while back I came up with the Geni Forest Density Calculator<\/a> to figure out just how many people there are in close proximity to any profile on the tree.\u00a0 The current leader, Brigham Young<\/a>, has nearly 2 million people within 10 step of him (because of all those wives). But even John Adams<\/a>, James Madison<\/a> and Ben Franklin<\/a> have over 400,000 people within just ten steps.\u00a0 Even at just 6 steps away we find thousands and thousands of people.\u00a0 For example, George Washington<\/a>\u00a0has nearly 12,000 people within just six steps of his profile, and he didn’t even have any children!<\/p>\n

So, even if you wanted to develop a complete tree for one person, it is a herculean task.\u00a0 You simply cannot do it by yourself.\u00a0 No matter how good you think you are and how long you work at it.\u00a0 You just can’t.<\/p>\n

It’s not a response to this problem to say “I just don’t care” about all those in-laws and in-laws of in-laws.\u00a0 Of course you care.\u00a0 You just don’t have the time to figure them all out.\u00a0 Who was at the wedding of your first cousin?\u00a0 Not just your side of the family (the 25% who are directly related to you) but also all of the other 75%.\u00a0 Each one of those unrelated people could have a photo or other information about someone in your family.\u00a0 Don’t say you don’t care to know.\u00a0 That’s not how genealogy works.\u00a0 We care about everything!<\/p>\n

When you get back to researching in small towns, you want to look at every family in the town.\u00a0 There are connections everywhere.\u00a0 Everyone was related to everyone else umpteen different ways.\u00a0 If you are just going up and following your bloodline, you’ll never find everyone.\u00a0 You have to expand and go sideways.\u00a0 I can’t tell you the number of times I have discovered something about one family while researching another.\u00a0 (For example, see the work I am doing on the Jewish families of Prague<\/a>.) But of course this brings us back to the problem of having limited time.\u00a0 You need a team of people to go through all the records and make all of the connections.\u00a0 You need to collaborate on a public tree.\u00a0 There is no other way.<\/p>\n

The skeptics’ most common complaint about Geni is that they find “so many mistakes.”\u00a0 I just have to laugh.\u00a0 In a tree with 4 million users and 120 million connected profiles, you’re bound to have lots of errors.\u00a0 Of course, those relatively tiny trees that these so-called experts keep on their hard drives are also riddled with errors and omissions.\u00a0 It is just that no one ever finds them.\u00a0 The paradox about collaborative trees is that the ease of finding mistakes, yours and other people’s, is actually one of the great benefits of the program.\u00a0 All of these mistakes can be easily and quickly corrected.\u00a0 Over time, this has made the tree on Geni more accurate and complete than any other tree in existence. Yes, more accurate than yours.\u00a0 I guarantee it.<\/p>\n

I have explained this before<\/a> but it is worth stating again, collaborative tree-building is the more scientifically rigorous method of genealogy.\u00a0 On collaborative trees, discrepancies get discovered, discussed and resolved. This is a direct result of the open nature of the collaboration.\u00a0 Putting a name on a collaborative tree is equivalent to publishing a theory.\u00a0 Once published, the theory can be examined and tested by others.\u00a0 You may think you have solved a genealogical problem on your tree, but until you let others take a look and test your conclusions, you really cannot have any confidence in your solution.\u00a0 As I have said before, there is no such thing as certainty in genealogy<\/a>.\u00a0 There is always the possibility that someone will come up with a new piece of conflicting evidence that forces you to reconsider your old conclusions.<\/p>\n

For sure, collaborative genealogy can be daunting, especially for old-timers who are used to doing things the old-fashioned way.\u00a0 But seriously, in what other domain would you listen to someone who won’t use the latest technological advances?\u00a0 By now I have dealt with hundreds of Geni skeptics<\/a> and complainers.\u00a0 Most, I have to say, have severe psychological problems that prevent them from collaborating with other people.\u00a0 Interestingly, these people often feel the need to offer their uninformed opinions to other people.\u00a0 I don’t know why.\u00a0 If they can’t play in the sandbox with the other kids, it shouldn’t hurt them that others are having fun there.\u00a0 But it does.\u00a0 They go on and on about how awful the sandbox is, as if seeing other people enjoying themselves and making progress is a great offense to their sensibilities.\u00a0 You have to just tune them out.<\/p>\n

I want to conclude with an explanation of a method I have developed that is a bit more advanced, and perhaps controversial, but has been very successful.\u00a0 Many genealogists start with the premise that they should only put what is certain on their tree.\u00a0 But this can make discoveries more difficult, because it is impossible to keep all of the unattached potential relatives in mind.\u00a0 When working through 18th century records in Prague, I have come up with a method that allows me to easily revisit possible connections.\u00a0 I set up a “Placeholder” for a given surname, and I place unattached people under the placeholder.\u00a0 For example, let’s say I find a marriage record and it says that the wife’s father is named Josef.\u00a0 I don’t know which Josef he is.\u00a0 There may be several with that surname.\u00a0 And I am working on the husband’s family.\u00a0 So I attach this Josef to a Placeholder with his surname, so I can revisit it later.\u00a0 After a while, you get a collection of these unattached profiles and you can work on figuring out how they all fit together.\u00a0 The trees are always a work-in-progress, but I find that this allows me to quickly move from one family to another, as I go through the records.\u00a0 You can also set up Placeholders at different generations.\u00a0 To people unfamiliar with this method, it may look like I am making mistakes, assuming people are siblings when they are not.\u00a0 But I can only judge by the results I am having, which are extraordinary.\u00a0 Look, for example at 10 generations of the Teweles family<\/a>. The Schefteles family<\/a>, or Porges family<\/a>, starting in 1500, are much more difficult, so you can see what this method looks like while it is still in-progress.\u00a0 I am using this method on hundreds of trees with dozens of active collaborators and it works.\u00a0 As we incorporate dna results in our trees, this method also has the advantage of bringing together likely related families so the dna results can be easily compared.<\/p>\n

Collaborative genealogy on Geni is allowing us to build trees and make connections in ways that simply were not possible before, and are not possible when working alone, no matter how good you think you are.\u00a0 To be a good genealogist today means adopting this new technology and collaborating with others.\u00a0 Anyone who tells you otherwise just doesn’t know what he is talking about.<\/p>\n

For questions, please contact me on Geni<\/a>, where I am a volunteer curator.\u00a0 The views here are my own, of course, and not Geni’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are a lot of people who claim to be good genealogists but really are not.\u00a0 These are folks who publicly gripe about collaborative genealogy sites like Geni.com.\u00a0 They claim to be interested in accuracy, but really they only care … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1467"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1482,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1467\/revisions\/1482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}