Tretower Genealogy Research

This past month there was quite a bit of activity at the Vaughan Pioneers group.  Our presence on the Internet, through web pages is drawing curious genealogical researchers to contact me, as well as bringing new people into the group.  We are preparing to pay for a Y-DNA test on another descendant of Beverly Vaughan and are trying to find a descendant of James and Martha Vaughan to test his Y-DNA and compare it to Ben Vaughan’s descendants to see just how the DNA matches.

A descendant of “Bona Nova” John Vaughan contacted me last week and his careful research made me think about how possible misinformation could be passed via the Internet.   In most cases, it is just sloppy genealogy or mere mistakes, but it is possible, if someone wanted to fake a line, to pass information that is erroneous.  Sometimes you will see a bit of legitimate information with some that is simply a guess mixed in.  Source information is of vital importance.  Sadly, when researching a line such as “Bona Nova” John Vaughan, there is not a lot of documents from the period of time that he lived in, to provide source information.  So much of research from earlier times is educated guess, hunches or logical deductions. 

Another problem with on-line research is changed e-mail addresses.  Over the years, people change their Internet provider and their e-mail addresses change.  Old queries on various genealogy pages are still shown with the old e-mail address and so who knows how many responses have never reached a researcher thanks to a change in provider.  My old e-mail address was ecdavis@atlascomm.net and anyone seeing this e-mail address is asked to respond instead to ec21davis@gmail.com .  Internet based e-mail addresses such as Gmail or Yahoo mail is probably the wisest option for researchers to place on query pages. 

Eddie