I love when I find a genealogy blog that I had not been aware of before! The information written on a genealogist’s personal blog can be entertaining, enlightening, and perhaps even informative. I try to keep in mind, however, that not every genealogy blog is going to be a useful resource for my genealogy research. Part of the reason why has to do with the very nature of what we define as “a blog”.
The word “blog” is a shortened form of the phrase “web log”. Before the age of the internet, if someone wanted to write down a detailed description of his or her work, or day to day activities, or daily musings and ideas about any subject at all, it was written on actual paper. This grouping of writings was called a diary, (if personal), or a “log”, (if professional). When people first started doing this kind of writing online, it was thought of as a log that is written on the internet, or world wide web. It wasn’t long before people shortened it all to “blog”, and we still use this term today.
Unfortunately, we have yet to create a word that designates the value of the writing in the blog itself. The genealogy blog you found might be written by a professional genealogist, whose advice you can completely trust as being reliable, factual, and informative. Or, it might be written by an amateur genealogist, who may have made mistakes along the way. It’s possible that the random genealogy blog you found doesn’t have much to do with genealogy at all, and instead goes of on other tangents. You can’t know for certain which kind of blog you have found until you read it over, and do a little digging to discover who the writer is, and what his or her qualifications are.
It is important not to use information that you find in someone’s genealogy blog as a main source for your genealogy research. Blogs can provide good information about what websites you might want to visit, sign up with, and search at. Some blogs have excellent reviews of genealogy software, books, or even online courses. And, of course, many blogs are simply an entertaining read, especially if the writer has included family stories. Just be careful not to assume that you are related to any of the people in those family stories, unless you happen to have documentation from more reliable sources.
Image by Annie Mole of Flickr