Help:Reliable Sources

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Sources are required on WikiTree. Reliable sources are required for all pre-1700 profiles. How do you know if a source is reliable? Here is a brief introduction to judging the reliability of genealogical source information with examples of reliable and unreliable sources.

See also:

Reliable Sources

Original or primary sources are the most reliable because they are recorded:

  1. at or near the time of an event, and
  2. by or with someone who has first-hand knowledge.

Examples:

  • Birth Records
  • Church Records including birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial, confirmations, and recantations
  • Court Records
  • Land Records, Property Deeds, Tax Records
  • Military Records
  • Marriage Records and marriage contracts
  • Will and Estate/Probate Records and Inventories
  • Death and Burial Records

Derivative or secondary sources are less reliable because every time a person transcribes, remembers, repeats, summarizes, or interprets information it introduces room for error.

The most reliable secondary sources are ones that carefully cite primary sources in a scholarly manner. Ideally, you should follow those source citations to examine the primary sources. However, sometimes only secondary sources are available (for example, there are cases where the original records were lost but there are books made by people who consulted the original records before they were lost).

Some academic or historical volumes are secondary sources but cite their sources in such a careful manner that pre-1700 projects consider them to be reliable sources for profiles, such as Robert Charles Anderson's Great Migration series, Stephen A. White's Dictionnaire généalogique des familles acadiennes, and G.E. Cokayne's The Complete Peerage. See Category:Reliable Sources for Pre-1700 Profiles.

Gravestones and memorials can be complicated to evaluate. A photo of a gravestone is a fairly reliable source for death information, but not birth information. If a memorial was created and placed long after death, it is not even reliable for death information. Text on a website such as Find-A-Grave without a gravestone photo is not reliable. See Help:Find-A-Grave.

Census records, family bibles, newspapers, and obituaries may be reliable for information that was recorded at or near the time of an event, but may also contain unreliable information.

Of course, no record is perfectly reliable.

Unreliable Sources

All family trees and genealogies, in all formats (websites, family genealogies published as books, CD-ROMs, family association newsletters, GEDCOMs, etc.) are secondary sources.

As discussed above, the most reliable secondary sources are ones that carefully cite primary sources. Conversely, the least reliable secondary sources are ones that do not reference any primary sources. This means that the information in them cannot be independently verified. It is second-hand information.

Family trees and genealogies may be valuable resources and may help you find original, reliable sources, but they are not reliable on their own. Family trees never qualify as reliable sources for pre-1700 profiles.

Examples:

  • Ancestry Member Trees
  • FamilySearch Tree
  • Find-A-Grave user-generated text
  • GEDBAS
  • Genealogie Online
  • genealogics.org
  • Geneanet
  • Geni
  • Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry (GRanDMA)
  • MyHeritage
  • Nos Origines
  • One World Tree
  • Roglo
  • stirnet.com
  • The Peerage (thePeerage.com)
  • Wikidata
  • Wikipedia
  • WikiTree
  • "Official" works of family associations

Some of the websites above contain many types of records, some of which are reliable original sources and some of which are not. Sites such as Ancestry and FamilySearch are like digital versions of libraries or archives. In a complete source citation they are "where the record was found," i.e. the "repository." Individual records are the sources we evaluate and cite, not repositories.

Many records on Ancestry and FamilySearch are not user-generated trees but they are not reliable original records either. They are collections or compilations built from family trees and other unreliable sources. For example:

  • Ancestral File
  • Community Trees - Mayflower Pilgrim Genealogies
  • Edmund West Collection
  • Family Data Collection
  • International Genealogical Index
  • Millennium File
  • North America, Family Histories 1500-2000
  • Pedigree Resource File
  • Rootsweb
  • Yates Publishing, US and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900


This page was last modified 16:30, 27 September 2023. This page has been accessed 2,330 times.