Perhaps one of the best ways to easily catch errors in your tree is to look at the dates of vital events for the people involved. Do they make sense? Is the timeline plausible?
Genealogists should know, as they say, where babies come from. Aside from modern interventions, parents have to in the same place roughly nine months before the birth. They also have to be alive at that same time.
Triple check before you add someone to your tree and don’t just take someone else’s online tree as gospel.
Sometimes a simple dose of “genealogy commonsense bleach” does an excellent job of cleaning. There are more advanced tools that can be used to “clean your tree,” but “genealogy commonsense bleach” will remove the majority of the grime on your tree.
3 Responses
Aside from children being born before their parents are born or after their parents are dead, another common mistake I find on trees is an event taking place before the place was established. Many of my ancestors moved west, but a record that a couple was married in a certain place does not indicate that the bride was born there, especially when she told Census takers she was born in a different state & the County wasn’t laid out until shortly before the marriage.
Only the mother would need to be alive at least for a few minutes while the baby is born.
I also don’t like auto fill for a location that did not exist at that time.
True about the mother. I agree with you about the auto fill for locations. I’ve had a relative somehow tag a small village in northern Germany as being in Nova Scotia and it gets repeated over and over. That gives new meaning to crossing the pond–and not in a good way.