Pruning the Limbs

A fellow researcher on the Scottish Indexes FB page shared this brilliant quote:

Elimination is as Useful as Confirmation for Illumination

Sometimes we get hints from commercial genealogy sites that are just too good to be true and we add them to our tree. If we follow the fake leads we will all end finding that we’re related to Charlemagne. But wouldn’t you rather be sure?

Ancestry.com is rife with bad data because people copy each others mistakes and don't verify. I’ve started using the “unknown sex” feature to show at a glance which “hints” are suspect. They are just hints.

Sometimes you just have to prune the tree and get rid of the limbs that don’t belong. The hardest one for me was to give up a branch that led to Brigadier General William Hay, a descendant of a long line of Scottish nobility going back to the Norman conquest. My family didn’t come from nobility - they were just plain workers in the fields, the mills, and the docks. But they loved their children and managed to keep them out of the orphanage.