Family Search.org

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. Yeah, I would be very very careful of any information you get from unsourced family trees

Last edited Tue Nov 28, 2017, 09:50 PM - Edit history (1)

you should try to independently verify anything you discover, since a lot of people make wild leaps and impossible connections based on nothing more than a similarity of names.

And if your ancestors have been in the South since the 1600's then it's almost certain that you'll probably find at least some slave owners in your family tree...the various branches of my family were mostly 17th century Southern colonists, in Maryland and Virginia, with a few ending up in the Carolinas and Kentucky; from what I can tell, collectively, my ancestors between them probably owned at least a thousand slaves...and the odds are pretty good that any African-American who has my (uncommon, English-origin) surname is probably a descendant of slaves owned by my ancestors/relatives. All of which are things I wasn't really aware of back when I started with geneaology, although I suppose I should probably have expected it.