My biggest rabbit trail was one that I inherited from my parents. I believe they used another researcher’s information and went with it. Unfortunately, this information is on many CDs and if all over the place online.

My Great-great-great-great grandfather was John Gaw. The confusion is that he supposedly was born John McGaw and dropped the Mc. The reason for this confusion is that there was a John Gaw and a John McGaw from South Carolina who both fought in the Revolutionary War, and both moved to the same region of Ohio.

In the days before the internet, it is easy to see how one person searching a microfilm and finding a John with almost the same surname and the right age to confuse the two.

I spent a lot of time trying to get John McGaw and his brother William and their father John back to Ireland. The confused source had them from Dunferaline, Ireland. I can find no such place, and think it is a confusion with Dumfermline, Scotland. They supposedly went to Ireland before they went to South Carolina. Again, it is easy to see how a confusion of hand-written notes could lead to a garbled name for a town in the wrong country.

After I found this, and had spent a couple of years off and on trying to find them there, I learned that I was researching the wrong people. I mentioned this to my Dad and he got upset over it. This is my Mom’s side of the family, why should he care? He’s the one who proved another of my Mom’s ancestors was not an unknown person among the Regulators hung by the British in North Carolina. There were several among that branch of the family that were not happy with this.

That is one thing in genealogy that one encounters quite often. Disproving the favorite family story, or proving something that no one else will accept. Genealogy stands on evidence, yet too many people take as gospel what they read in a book someone put together. If the book does not tell you where they found the information so you can verify it, how do you know it is true? In this way, genealogy is a science. Given the same sources and the same information, two people should be able to come to the same conclusion.

There is a lot of gray area in that last sentence. If the sources do not have names and dates or are not primary sources, there can be a lot of room for supposition. However, any supposition should be supported by the facts, not that we are trying to prove something because we want it to be true. That is why the study of genealogy begins with the present and works from what we know, and goes back one generation at a time.

We must make a good start of it, or how will two or three generations from now know that we gave them the right people? We have to document it. If we knew the people, such as our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren, we need to document that we had first-hand knowledge of that person, and that we asked our parents to give us all they knew. Documentation of such interviews, will go a long way to help future generations and help them avoid unnecessary rabbit trails.