Search your Family History and Build Proof

A well researched and accurately documented family genealogy is important to preserve your history. Your Family tree is only as good as the sources that support it. The sources you find should contain information that helps to build a solid ancestry. This is accomplished by searching for documents that help to create a unified family relationship. Some people call this process "clustering". Family history search begins with a question of identity, relationship, event or situation. Genealogists must gather and analyzes data from sources documents to formulate answers to questions based on the resulting evidence. Finding original documents that link relatives for building a reliable ancestry. You need to build parent-child, spouse and other blood relative relationships, to build family proof.

Genealogy family search is truly a work of art and labor of love. Many hobbyists have taken up genealogy because of the amount of information that is readily available over the internet. They are taking the information as being gospel, and copying anything and everything as fast as they can. This would be ok if everyone had proof to back up their information, but the majority of hobbyists do not. It takes one file to be copied by a user, who assumes the information of one or more individuals is assumed to be the person they are researching. Misidentified people based on circumstantial evidence causes an epidemic of “mis-information” and lost family histories. This can also happen if you solely rely on indexed information, where the information can be wrong do to errors created by the person interpreting the information from an original document, or another index. Other issues arise when a primary document is found, but the information doesn’t match any information you thought to be true and contradicts other primary sources. This can be caused by your ancestor, on purpose or by mistake. So how do you evaluate and use the information that you do find?

Genealogists use Proof Standards
There are genealogical proof standards to help researchers build reliable family trees. Proof standards were put into place to rate the reliability of the document its self, the information in the document as well as the reliability of document and information combined based on how the information was obtained and by who. This makes up the credibility of family relationships, life events, and other genealogical details. Depending on whose standards you use, there are different steps and processes. But all are meant to achieve the same goal, a family history that is close to the truth as possible.

So what might be included in the proof standards? The proof standards include conducting a reasonably exhaustive search; complete and accurate source citations; analysis and correlation of the collected information; resolution of any conflicting evidence; and a sound coherently written conclusion. You might not be inclined to want to go through all these steps, because it is too complicated, or you don’t have the time, or you don’t want to spend that much effort on creating a reliable history. The rules and standards can be overwhelming and not practical for the mainstream genealogist. But to have a family tree that is as accurate as can be, some guidelines should be followed.

Bridging the gap between the proof standards, helping to educate the genealogy hobbyist, we have created an easy to use Progress Rating Guide, customizable for your needs. It takes into consideration important life events, building family relationships, and source reliability, quality and information. It gives the genealogist a sense of ‘the big picture’ of where they are and what they should work on next within their family tree.

The Progress Rating Guide also includes a Color Coded Chart which is grouped into six different color codes, indicating the completeness of your family tree which helps guide you visually to understand where you need to do more family search. Our tools help users to build a reliable family tree to share with present relatives and future generations.