There are a lot of perils in researching genealogy. A lot of records are handwritten or transcribed. Transcription errors happen and handwriting can be sloppy. Also sometimes people didn’t keep very accurate records. We’ve even found headstones where the birth year was incorrect.

On top of these clerical issues, amateur genealogists fill their own trees with garbage in an attempt to fabricate a complete tree. Name match errors are common and a lot of people disregard things that common sense would show you didn’t happen. (Children born years after the death of their father. Men and women getting married and having children at impossible ages. Children born before their parents. Seen them all!)

This research goes back almost two millennia in some cases. Here are some very important considerations for you to keep in mind.

1. We are very confident in the research from the last 200  years. While there is always a chance for some errors, these records are well written, stored and maintained. Many have been transcribed and are verifiable from multiple sources.
2. Records between 200-400 years old can at times be sketchy. Much of those records have been cleaned up, verified where possible and tied together from multiple sources. However not all records were stored during that time, many were lost, and some relies on research from others written in books some time ago. Some of that third party research is very good. Some is spotty. A LOT has been disregarded and proven inaccurate, not having been included in these records. Trust us in that we have cleaned up many records and only written what we have reason to believe is plausible or true.
3. Records over 400 years old are historic or academic in nature. They come from all over. Even some less than reliable sources. However being much of this research is academic in nature, we cannot build personal relationships with people in these generations, and the lineal descendants of them can be many hundreds of thousands of people. This information is here for curiosity’s sake more than anything.
4. Some records are very suspicious. In these cases notes have been entered to show discrepancies that have not been sorted out. While some of this comes down to bad record keeping around family changes, others is simply poor research on the part of individuals. Please see the notes and take these situations as a grain of salt related to the fact that this work is still ongoing today.
5. This research may not match your own research. Contact us. We will do what we can to help sort things out if you feel there are any errors.

Please enjoy!