We’ve all been there … you create your family tree and post it somewhere online (or in many places), and then weeks, months or years later you realize that there’s a mistake!
What to do? Basically, correct it. Yes, it will take a bit of time and you may have to dig out (or reset) a password you haven’t used in ages, AND, you really don’t want to perpetuate the mistake more than might have already happened. Plus, we really do want to ensure that our trees are as accurate as possible. We are human; we will make mistakes.
We know that people love to borrow whatever information they find, often without verifying it. If we keep our trees as accurate as possible, hopefully more accurate information will be found online.
I was reminded of this when I re-read Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings post Nobody's Perfect! Correcting My Own Tree Error.
The comments to the post also raised how one might keep track of the “wrong” information that was originally included to give both context to what was previously included and why the correction was made. This is really excellent thinking. When we are dealing with like-named individuals living geographically close at the same time, others might run into the same issue as what we resolved. Providing the correct lineage and noting the incorrect lineage may benefit many other researchers.
How have you handled correcting errors in your genealogy tree?
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