Bad Genealogy

The genealogy of Thomas and Eleanor Shannon who settled in frontier Georgia in 1773 is a classic example of the unfortunate tendency of amateur researchers to copy and past erroneous historic data into online family trees.

In particular, there are three individuals who are typically associated with a number of factually unsupportable family history claims, Thomas Shannon (c.1730-1794), John Shannon (c. 1759-1815) and John C. Shannon (1816-1896). I’m not asserting absolutely that the claimed information is incorrect, but simply that no documentation exists to substantiate it. If any exists and can be posted, I would be happy to withdraw these objections.

Modern technology has allowed the rapid dissemination of bad research. People see something posted in someone’s family tree, and without even doing any actual checking for documentation copy it to their own tree.

Or, they find someone with a similar name, living in a similar social context, but with a more interesting past based on some romanticized version of history they saw from Hollywood, and insert that person into their tree, which other people than start to copy and the poor research proliferates.

Genealogical proof should be thought of in the same way as legal proof in a court of law. The standard should be ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’. It doesn’t need to be proof in an absolute mathematical or scientific manner. It simply needs to be supported by some type of legal documentation that can be validated as part of a chain of documentation. Now that we have the science of DNA available, genetic relationships can be included in the chain of documentation. This is especially true for YDNA, the small bit of DNA that passes directly from father to son.

Short of a reasonable doubt, a ‘best guess’ is appropriate as long as it is understood to be a guess and documented as such. No one is going to prison, after all, on a genealogical hunch.

A hypothetical relationship can be offered if it conforms to some rational, accepted historic context. Someone who was married in 1845 probably isn’t the person of the same name who was born in 1710.

Even wild speculation can be tolerated as long as it is based on at least some kind of documented history.

Very few family trees online with ancestors back more than a century or so meet this simple standard. Most are little more than works of fiction.

Unbroken document chains back into the 18th century are rare simply because there was no easy means of miniaturizing documents. When a legal document no longer included living people, it was usually destroyed or reused to make room for new documents. Space was limited, as was concern for future genealogists trying to discover the birth record of some distant ancestor living a mundane, unremarkable life on a local farm.

Even institutions that tried to maintain permanent records in some format would burn at frequent rates. Stacks of old paper inside of wooden buildings lite and warmed with open flames were a bonfire waiting to happen.

My point with publishing this is to provide an example for every online genealogist to clean up their online trees and to encourage others to do the same.