Genealogy: The Basics Trivia Quiz

Answer: No

Uploaded family trees are usually best avoided unless you can find a way to check them. They typically are copied from another tree someone else uploaded, which came from yet another tree, and so on. The major problem is they rarely include sources of information or cite information without any investigation, leading to errors that should be obvious if they paid attention, such as a child being born five or six years after the father died.

Answer: derivative source

Derivative sources are copies that have been made of primary documents, such as transcripts or microfilm copies of church records that are hundreds of years old, and thus unavailable to the general public because of preservation concerns. Any source, primary or otherwise, can contain errors, which is why you must always fully analyze any document you find!

Answer: create a reference citation

The very next thing you need to do after locating a new source for an ancestor is to create a reference citation so you (and anybody else who will read your work) can locate the record at a later time. An excellent guide to properly form genealogical citations is "Evidence Explained" by Elizabeth Mills.

But any format, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, will work as long as you are consistent through your research.

Answer: No

Original works published (even if privately published) prior to 1923 are in the public domain in the United States. This can make searching for more information about an early ancestor much easier, as many of these books can be found online through repositories such as Google Books or the Internet Archive, and many libraries regularly add newly digitized material every day.

Answer: Whether or not you found data relevant for your research

Research notes are used to organize the various sources of information you have already checked or plan to check. It may seem tedious to write down these research notes, but it is better than wasting time going through the same records again and again.

There are many websites that offer free materials that can be downloaded for logging your research, such as the genealogy section of the US National Archives website.

Answer: It was destroyed in a fire.

The 1890 Census was destroyed in a fire on January 10, 1921. Only approximately 6,000 names still exist out of nearly 70,000,000. Fortunately, the 1890 Veterans and Widows Census was mostly unharmed, allowing people to trace any ancestors who fought in the Civil War as well as their residence in 1890.

Answer: There's no such thing as a family coat of arms

Unfortunately for many Americans who ordered their "family coat of arms" off the internet, there simply is no such thing. While rules and customs varied throughout Europe, a coat of arms was usually given to an individual, not the entire family. In the UK, the father's crest could be used by the eldest son but not until the father's death, otherwise the coat of arms had to be slightly modified, as any given coat of arms belonged to an individual. Crests are merely the design located above the helmet and below the motto on a coat of arms.

Answer: Register System

The Register System uses Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) to denote generations and lower case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii) to denote children born to parents in a given generation, in order of their birth. If a child had children of their own (creating a new generation) an Arabic numeral is placed in front of the Roman numeral which denotes that particular child. That child would then start a new generation, being marked with the Arabic numeral assigned to that child after everybody in the previous generation has been listed.

Answer: GEDCOM

The GEDCOM, or Genealogical Data Communication, was developed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1996. It formats genealogical data for each person in your family tree as a text file which can then be read by other genealogy software, allowing people to share data who use different genealogy programs.

Answer: Family history is a narrative, while a genealogy focuses on listing ancestors.

Writing a family history can seem daunting. With lots of information available, weaving your ancestor's experiences into the context of the period in which they lived will take a lot of effort. A genealogy on the other hand is basically a summary of dates and people you've uncovered as well as their basic relationships to each other, but without historical context or even family stories and lore.