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Help[Facts] Re: Is Ancestry.com a reliable source?
in reply to a message by Mossy
ancestry.com (and other big genealogical sites) combines a lot of data sources of very different quality like census records, transcripts from church registers, and user submitted information.
All those sources aren't perfect, they contain errors of different types: Census takers may mishear and misspell names they note, transcribers may read the handwriting wrong or there are OCR errors, someone may inadvertedly or even deliberately enter wrong information.
So when you find something there, you still need to employ some judgement. I won't give much on a name form that is only recorded once in one census in the USA, it is probably wrong. When the same name form occurs in independent sources, things are better and more reliable.
All those sources aren't perfect, they contain errors of different types: Census takers may mishear and misspell names they note, transcribers may read the handwriting wrong or there are OCR errors, someone may inadvertedly or even deliberately enter wrong information.
So when you find something there, you still need to employ some judgement. I won't give much on a name form that is only recorded once in one census in the USA, it is probably wrong. When the same name form occurs in independent sources, things are better and more reliable.
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