When we make misteaks…
The Legal Genealogist admits it.
It’s a consistent failing.
Even with a calculator at hand, I am mathematically challenged.
I joke about owning a complete one-for-every-day set of t-shirts reading: “I was an English major, you do the math.”1
And every so often … sigh … I prove just how challenged I can be.
Case in point: yesterday’s blog post. Where in the chart that accompanied the post I blithely asserted that since 12.5% was the expected amount of DNA inherited from a great grandparent, half of that would be 6.75%, and thus the expected amount of DNA inherited from a second great grandparent.2
Right.
Sigh.
I still haven’t figured out how I made the mistake, but here’s the point: the instant a kind reader, Ken Kerr, called it to my attention, I fixed it. The post and the chart now online are correct: half of 12.5% is 6.25%
And whether it’s in a blog post, or in a family tree chart, when we make a mistake, we need to fix it.
When I was just getting started as a baby genealogist, I made every single mistake you can make. The book says my Bakers were from Boston? Sure! Except DNA said years later we were about as closely related to the Boston Bakers as to Adam and Eve… The census says that second youngest child was a girl? Fine! Until you realize the female Birdie was the male Bert. Same name same age same place — must be my guy, right? Until you figure out that every single male line in this family for 100 years gave at least one son the exact same name…
So… what do we do when we make a mistake?
We fix it.
Genealogically, our goal is to “reconstruct family histories or achieve genealogical goals that reflect historical reality as closely as possible”3 — to reach “accurate answers to research questions.”4
Sometimes that means correcting a mathematical mistake. Sometimes it means correcting a name or an age or a gender. And sometimes — as with my Bakers — it means lopping off whole branches of the family tree, and starting all over again.
It means — genealogically — ensuring that we have evidence to support our assertions. That we conduct reasonably exhaustive research into our question using the best available records. That we cite our sources. That we analyze and correlate the evidence we have found. That we resolve conflicts in the evidence. That we reach — and write up — our soundly reasoned conclusion.5
And when we make misteaks mistakes, it means we fix them.
With the help, occasionally, of a kind reader.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “12.5 divided by…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 15 Mar 2021).
SOURCES
- In reality, I was a journalism major, but it’s close enough. ↩
- Judy G. Russell, “Extrapolating from those numbers…,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 14 Mar 2021 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 15 Mar 2021). ↩
- Board for Certification of Genealogists, Genealogy Standards 2d ed. (Nashville, TN: Ancestry.com, 2019), 1. ↩
- Ibid. at 34, Standard 59, “Proved conclusions.” ↩
- See “The Genealogical Proof Standard,” Chapter 1 in Genealogy Standards 2d ed., at 1-3. ↩
Thank you so much for reminding us that mistakes are growing opportunities and when we fix them with humility we are showing our professionalism and our willingness to grow! We all make mistakes, and we aren’t expected to be perfect–even if we want to–but we can weed out the unmotivated by seeing who fixes them and who ignores them and pretends they never happened.
No harm, no fowl (yes, I did that on purpose). Seriously, though, we’ve all made those kinds of mistakes. And, you are on point – don’t let the mistakes persist; we need to correct them.
I was too chicken to leave the mistake uncorrected (and yes I did that on purpose too!)…
It was not a whale of a mistake to start with. (And, yes, I did that on porpoise.)
Ouch. 🙂
Ah, yes, the Dunlop genealogy file… I done lopped off plenty of stuff across the years.
LOL!! I have a LOT of Dunlops!!
Now my trouble is, I remember the flawed research families better than the correct line!!
Love your honesty Judy, and throughly enjoyed the comments.
Plus I was an English major in college and my husband was a math major so I want one of those tee shirts!
I love mistakes! I really do learn more from them. The mistakes that I dislike are the ones I cannot fix.
I also find I like the people who make and admit their mistakes better than those who seem to get everything right the first time. I feel I can’t relate to their perceived perfection, I am hopelessly flawed!
Thank you for your blog on making mistakes. When I started I put a father in a family and it was about 2 years before I realized the father was 11 years old when his son was born. I then noticed others had just assumed it was right and had added him to their tree. Its nice to see someone admitting a mistake.
We all make mistakes. What we do with them is what’s important.
Know what you mean about the Bakers….I’m descended from some Adams, and I tried for years to make it the John – John Quincy ones….but no. Some obscure Adams who showed up in the Carolinas after the Revolution. I done lopped off a couple thousand people because of that one, but there are still Ancestry trees that are replicated from my mistake, and folks on FamilyTree that keep trying to perpetuate it. One can correct one’s mistakes, but one cannot force others not to copy them.
Too true, I’m afraid. There are still database copies out there from my bad beginner mistakes… 🙁
I feel like this is an important message that relates to all aspects of life. We are all life-long learners, and by making mistakes we learn and change our methods. I am very amateur at genealogy, do you also track your mistakes in your research log, like you would for conflicting evidence? I have often found myself going down the same rabbit hole only to finally realize that I didn’t keep accurate notes as I researched. It’s so easy to get excited about discoveries that logging my path isn’t written down as quickly as I can click to new pages. Thank you for the reminder about mistakes and that even professionals make them occasionally!
It really does help to note your mistakes, or at least to explain how you concluded that other information was correct. For example, see http://pamunkeybakers.com/paper/02.pdf for a still-not-complete analysis of “why we don’t descend from Alexander Baker of Boston”.
I appreciate your reminder that we all make mistakes. I did some genealogy years ago and then life took me in different directions over the years. I am now back in school and taking classes to learn how to do it better! I feel the need to go back and go through what I did before and make corrections to the mistakes I’m sure I made!