The Letters

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After a few years away from the project, I decided in late 2008 to start updating the website, and give it a fresh look. Of course this meant re-visiting two suitcases of material, some further research and re-contacting some of my father's old friends. This time, I began to look at the genealogy records that my father had written, the family histories of ancestors dating to shortly after their arrival in Canada - his father's family from Iceland in 1887, and his mother's family, Irish and Prussian immigrants who settled in Renfrew County, Ontario in the 1860's.

As with most genealogy projects, unless you are directly descended from royalty the written records be a source of confusion, consternation and frustration when you come to a dead end. In searching through the Canadian census records and comparing them to submissions on the two most well-known genealogy websites, I discovered that several erroneous "pedigrees" had been submitted to the Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org records, by people trying to make a person "fit" into another family tree. 

Finding these errors is one thing...... having them corrected is another, much longer process. The correct data must be separated and categorized as to census year, land title and any other information. Then the ancestry site is notified, then a letter detailing the corrections sent to the original submitter, then the new information submitted to the ancestry records. Unfortunately, the incorrect information is not deleted. It remains, and the new information is added as separate data.

No wonder people spend so much time on genealogy.