On FamilySearch.com I recently entered a great grandfather’s name and was shocked to find what looked like a pedigree that went back to 1600!
I don’t want this to be a Mormon bashing thread. I am not one but some of my relatives are, and while I don’t agree that all those ancestors are really being ‘baptised’ or whatever, I keep my mouth shut. But I always understood that the LDS genealogical research was something of the standard for genealogy.
Is FamilySearch.com the same as the LDS genealogies I have always heard of? The site is obviously Mormon.
There is no doubt that the FamilySearch site has been at the forefront of the Internet revolution in family history. However, you need to assume that it has all the same problems as any other genealogical website. Don’t take anything on trust. With all due respect to them, amateur genealogists are often not very good at understanding just how difficult it is to prove genealogical connections, with them being particularly prone to wishful thinking. Any pedigree you find on the web (and in books, for that matter) should be checked out. You should also check the original documents for yourself. The LDS parish registers transcripts, the old IGI, are a wonderful resource, but they’re riddled with transcription errors. All this may sound a counsel of perfection, but it can take just one mistake to set you off on the wrong trail.
I have found a number of mistakes in the geneology of show-business people. They seem to take that data from published sources, many of which are inaccurate. So . . . If they’re wrong about Theda Bara and the Talmadge sisters, they might just be wrong about other folks. too.
The LDS records are, at times, astonishingly bad. Children who were born before their parents, people who have 2 or more different mothers or fathers listed, etc. No attempt seems to have been made to do even a quick rationality check. What is also irksome is that it focuses on ancestor search. Little attempt is made to track siblings or descendents in general. Real genealogists would never do such a thing.
Use the familysearch info only as a guide as to where to seek records. Don’t trust anybody’s research except your own unless it is of professional quality (which includes heavy citations). But also keep in mind that a lot of people, esp. 100+ years ago, produced seemingly professional genealogies that have since turned out to be quite fanciful. E.g., there’s one for “Spinger” that claims a direct male descent from Charlemagne from the 1800s that, although long disproven, still appears in GEDcom files all over the place. (And thus appears in familysearch).