Three Ps

Most serious family historians are unashamedly pedantic. That's fine – family historians need to be accurate. 

However, being overly pedantic can lead to becoming impatient and intolerant. Sometimes irritation with information that is not strictly correct in one part of a story can lead to missing vital clues in another.

Those public family trees scattered around the internet can be frustrating when they contain information that is obviously incorrect (i.e. WRONG!).  I can understand mistakes in choosing the wrong "John Smith" but find it difficult to figure how an ancestor could become a parent at 4 years of age. You get the picture. 

For many years, I've been looking for one of my families who lived in Uxbridge. They had 17 children and lived in abject poverty in the first half of the 1800s.  Many of the children died in infancy but some just disappeared, seemingly into thin air, between one census and the next.  My breakthrough came when I discovered a public tree on Ancestry.com.  Some of the information didn't agree with my findings and normally my pedantic, impatient, intolerant side would opt out with a swift click on the back arrow -  but this time I hung in there.  

Persistence paid off and lead to finding three of my missing people living in New Zealand. Whoo-Hoo!!

So while it's good to be pedantic, this example shows that family researchers need to be patient and persistent too.

CC Image