One of the main stumbling blocks I've come across on my journey to find Capt Jesse is actually, believe it or not, other people trying to do the exact same thing. When I do a search in Ancestry for information I try to stay away from other people's public trees. I know they are on their own quest to find out where they came from, and they very well may be on the same route I'm on, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're after the same thing ... if that makes any sense at all.
Yes, it's good to share .... yes, it's good to link up names that go together, and often other people's trees are the only way to do that. BUT ... and this is a big BUT ... some of them are just WRONG. There is a guy in particular that I've gradually come to accept that I should never accept his family tree as being valid information. He tends to find hints, take them as gospel, fill in his tree without further research, then moves on to the next one. Then all of these newbies come along and think that since he has so much done on his tree, he must be right. They copy his tree info into theirs, now we've got 2 invalid trees, and from there it grows exponentially. I've sent him a number of emails asking for sources for some of the things he has posted ... of course I never get a reply.
I do end up checking his tree every now and then as comparison to mine, take it all with a grain of salt, then go looking for verification sources to back it up.
With all the work I've put into this search: reading wills, obituaries, birth-marriage-death certificates, letters, cemetery inscriptions, anything I can get my hands on, I try my hardest to be able to list sources for my finds. Not always, but as often as I can. My ultimate goal, of course, is to figure out Capt Jesse. Until then I try to keep my records as accurate as possible, in regards to spelling, dates, places, etc, with sources for as much as I can possibly manage.
