I was recently looking for a death entry in an online index to Michigan deaths. Multiple searches in the county did not reveal a single entry of interest. Digging a little deeper into the index showed that there were actually no entries for that particular county for the years of interest in that database. Although the database label stated that it held records for a certain set of years, and I knew that there were death records for that particular county for those years, they had apparently not been included in the database yet. The database was incomplete.

I’ve found this to be the case in several situations. I’ve also found similar variations of this type of problem resulting from online record databases. While I love the availability of records now online and in database format, it is important to know what is data is truly in the database. A negative search may not mean your ancestor doesn’t appear in those records. It may just mean that your ancestor’s record wasn’t included in that database.

Another example comes from some research I was doing for my Master’s thesis. I was using some marriage data for a particular county in Mississippi to analyze demographics. I had conducted research on a particular woman in the county. I knew a great deal about her life. A search for her marriage in an online index revealed a marriage date for this woman that I knew from other records could not be correct. I checked the source of the information for the index. Fortunately, the database listed the source from which it had taken the information. An index to the marriage records had been compiled and published in book format several years ago. The marriage records in the online database had been copied from that book index, and not from the original marriage records.

Concerned about the validity of the database and book data, I compared all the marriages in the online index and book index with the original marriage records for the county. I needed my statistics to be correct. I found that there were several other errors in the printed book index, all of which had been perpetuated in the online index. If you were only to check the online index you would never know the date was wrong! You might encounter, as I did initially, problems in reconstructing the family.

As you conduct genealogical research in this era of ever-increasing online database access, it is important to know the scope and quality of information in these online databases. Understand that some information may be missing; some information may have been abstracted with errors. Check the source of the database information and wherever possible look at the original record.