Tracing Family roots

[gilmore]

Uhhh, geeee, that's a good question. Hmmm, let me see, why did I help her locate Skitten Muir? (Which was actually no bother at all, but thanks for your concern.)

Oh yeah, now I remember. I 'bothered' because she asked. I'll post the quote again and I'll try to type more slowly.

I hope that didn't go by you so quickly this time and that you can see she was asking W-H-E-R-E Skida Muir is located. Makes no difference to me if it has any relationship with anyone's family, she was asking where a place might be located and I was able to help her.

I reiterate: in the context of this thread, "Tracing family roots," why else would some one be interested in place names that is the same as one's surname but have no other connection with it, unless some one hoped to be able to leap backward across the centuries, choose a place name and then start working forward from it to one's proven ancestry? Place names, especially descriptive ones such as the one under discussion, come and go and are forgotten over the centuries. People make mistaken assumptions often these days, and are chargined when they discovered they have spent years going the wrong way tracing a false lead. In genealogy we always work from the present backward, a generation at a time.

You can continue trying to steer the discussion away from that simple fact, but from where I sit you are only making yourself look silly.


.... As another has pointed out to me, it is a wonder that we've managed to get along so well around here without you pointing out how wrong we've all been.

I'm not sure if you crawled out of the wrong side of your kip, didn't get enough coffee or what burr it is you seem to have under your saddle, but I don't need you ankle-biting me. Go nip, snarl and make nuisance of yourself someplace else, aye?


Here you are correct, there may be absolutely no connection. But if you have learned a bit about a historic area of Scotland, then you have been made slightly richer in knowledge and it truly wasn't a waste of anyone's time.

As you point out, you are indeed not alone in having been mistaken in an assumption, or "how wrong we've all been." The internet has been both a boon and a curse for the more serious genealogical researchers. On the one hand it can make our work much easier. Rather than going to the federal archives (across town or across 5 states) and then slowly going through reel after reel of microfilm, we can subscribe to ancestry.com and do an online search of census records for the person we are looking for. On the other hand, the boom in newbies interested in genealogy with no notions of quality control or context has resulted in an incredibly huge boom in very bad genealogical information online, bad info that is passed on and on and on, and mistakenly accepted as fact by larger and larger numbers of people. I am happy to do whatever I can to help inform newcomers to genealogy of common pitfalls.

Going from past to present is one of these. We always workd backward. To give an example of why: I am descended from a woman named Anne Bruce. There is a family story that she was a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce. So, a cousin went to Scotland to trace our descent from Robert the Bruce forward. Of course, when she got there, she discovered that his male line died out rather quickly. It is possible that we descend from Robert the Bruce, but the only way to show it is to go backward, generation by generation, from what we know. It's true that one does ocassionally come across a "treasure trove" of reliable research some one else has already done, but these are few and far between, especially when we are first starting out.

I have somewhere links to FAQ for genealogical newbies that I hope to find and post that may prove helpful.