I was looking for someone else on the Internet when I stumbled across Sarah Odding. I recognized her immediately. Recently I had completed a study of Rev. John Eliot’s list of the first two hundred people to join the church at Roxbury, Massachusetts. Sarah, her mother, her stepfather, and her future husband had all joined the church in late 1633. Eliot’s list said:

John Porter
Margaret Porter the wife of John Porter.

. . .

Phillip Sherman, he came into the Land in the year 1633. a Single man, & after married Sarah Odding, the daughter of the wife of John Porter, by a former husband. . . .

. . .

Sarah Odding. she was daughter in law to John Porter & came wth her parents & was after married to Philip Sharman of this church.¹

Based on this, in my published study I had stated that Sarah, like her stepfather, was “said to be” from Messing, Essex, in East Anglia, without exploring those origins much further.² (Almost all of the early Roxbury settlers were from a fairly distinct section of Essex, Suffolk, and Hertfordshire.)

Therefore I was quite surprised to learn on the Internet that Sarah was born 5 Feb 1609/10 in Germany, and that the identity of both her mother and father were known. Had I missed something?

The Web page where I renewed my acquaintance with Sarah contained no documentation, but, undaunted, I launched an Internet search, systematically working my way through all the search engines available to me. I found Sarah ten more times. Poor Sarah Odding. The picture of her that emerged was even fuzzier. Although there were similarities among the 11 sites, no two agreed in full. A small portion of the conflicting data, that relating to her birth, is summarized at right.

Suppose that Sarah Odding is your ancestor and you wish to add her to your database. What will you enter? Why? What source will you cite?

Sarah #8 is an annotated text version of Eliot’s list (yes, real data on the Internet). [Check out the print version of this article to see a copy of the search results.] As a contemporary record, it is a good source. However, if you enter only the information from #8, you’ll lose all that temptingly specific information from the other sites. What do you do?

Perhaps a bigger question is: How did Sarah get so fragmented? Were all of those genealogists bad researchers? Before you bristle at what you may suspect will be another criticism of genealogy on the Internet, let me ask a different question. How long has it been since you worked on some of the families in your database? I’ll answer that one about myself—I know that sections of my database were entered in a beta version of a CPM program, just about the time GEDCOM was developed. (Does anybody remember that far back?)

Just how good is your data? Mine is a hodgepodge—lineages based on everything from meticulous personal research to undocumented family histories. Over the years, software has changed dramatically and my research skills have improved considerably, but most of my data hasn’t changed at all.

I know I need to verify anything before I publish it myself, but in the meantime, I need a place to keep my information. Unfortunately, that means that if I were to use one of the handy-dandy utilities or software features that lets me produce a Web site with hypertext links up and down my family tree, those links would include a leap into a Scottish ancestral line that might best be described as mythical, entered over a decade ago.

Just because we can—that’s why we generate massive linked trees for our Web sites. How often do we stop to think, “This is publishing.” Sarah Odding was a real person. She deserves to be treated as a person, with respect. All our ancestors do. That means verifying the information about them before we publish.

It’s unreasonable to expect that we can verify every bit of information before we put it online. Does that justify doing it anyway? No. Then does that mean that you shouldn’t publish it online? Yes and no. You should publish what you’ve verified and feel good about. (That’s not the same as “having all the answers”—one of the best reasons to publish is to get the attention of other descendants who have that missing bit of information you want.) You should not publish your equivalent of Sarah Odding’s German birth or my mythical Scottish lineage. Before you click OK to generate a linked-tree or text-based Web site, back up a bit. Select just the branch of your family tree that you’ve researched personally. Then generate those Web pages (with documentation, please).

And what about poor Sarah Odding? She’s a real person again.³

Notes
1. New England Historic Genealogical Register 35 (July 1881): 2124, 241247.
2. Great Migration Newsletter 6 (Jul 1997): 19–25.
3. Sarah’s numerous Sherman descendants can consult Patricia Law Hatcher, “Reconstructing Sarah (Odding) Sherman, Wife of Philip Sherman of Portsmouth, Rhode Island,” The American Genealogist 73: (July 1998) for her English origins.

Pat Hatcher, CG, is a technical writer, instructor, and professional genealogist.