Do My Clothes Match?



There are many exciting changes and happenings on Family Search’s Family Tree.  Contributors may source link documents to ancestors and attach photographs and stories.   As a researcher, however, I see a real issue with the linking process:  you don’t have to examine the record you are attaching!!!  It is like dressing in the dark—you grab a shirt and pants and hope it matches?!?!

The only information you have to go with is the computer generated result from the contributor’s foundational information and the transcription of the original document.  You just click and it is attached.  There is no analyzing the document, accessing the original information or reading the source for clues to further your research.  This scares me as a researcher; but as a click as you go “Family Search” contributor this is as easy as one, two, and three.

Are we doing a disservice to newbie’s by telling them it is as easy as one, two, and three?  Just click here and there and it is done?  I have worked very hard and diligently to learn how to research.   It wasn’t just sit down at the computer on a Sunday afternoon and click away.  I am talking about sitting through hours and hours of classes, reading and buying books on how to research as well as where and what I was researching, days of sifting through dusty ledgers in county courthouses, reels and reels of microfilm reading where my eyes were ready to bug out and hours spent examining original sources.
It is the journey and process of researching that teaches you HOW to research and WHAT to research.  I have learned by trial and error.  What do you learn by clicking?  

Secondly, are we doing a disservice when we make it look fast and easy?  It is the process and the journey that introduce us to our ancestors, it is the process and journey that teach us who they were and how they lived.  By taking the time to search I have come across things that relate to me that I didn’t know existed or that I would ever need.  It is by sifting through many sources that we find the supporting evidence that supports what we find.  

I feel like we are robbing newbie’s of this intimate attachment to their ancestors if we just teach them it is fast and easy and just click away. . .is that really how we get to know our ancestors?

(note:  Ancestry also tries to make it easy for newbie’s with the “shaky leaf”. )

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