Genealogists are always thinking that they are going to publish a book about their genealogy research. They have the mistaken opinion that it will be of interest to other people. Of course the only other people that are at all interested are the very few other genealogists who are researching the same family. The problem with publishing a genealogy book as that as soon as you do you will stumble across a new fact that makes some aspect of your newly published book wrong. Now you have become the worst thing in the world to a genealogists–someone who has published erroneous work. Somehow, those erroneous facts are always picked up by other researchers and treated as facts. They seem to spread like wildfire and you will always know that it is your fault for having published a book before the research was complete.

Of course, with genealogy the research is never complete. This is why all serious genealogists have one or more partially finished books somewhere on their computer. Or, as in my case, a completely finished ebook that I’m afraid to release because I don’t want to be responsible for spreading incorrect histories. I know this will happen, because I only finished the book less than 3 months ago and just last week I received an email from someone who had found an error in my on-line genealogy. Of course this error is also in the ebook.

I did publish a hardcopy book several years ago. It was a gift to my Dad on his 95th birthday. I haven’t found too much stuff that was in the book that is actually wrong–just a few things, but I know a lot more information now than I did then. I’m glad I did it, because my Dad really enjoyed the book. Another thing that I learned from writing that book is that it forces you to double check and verify your facts. So writing the book is a good thing because it aids your research. There’s nothing like writing something down that other people are going to read to make you want to be sure it’s correct.