The Quality We Leave Behind

            When writing a research paper, gathering information for court, or even just doing something for your family; you must always be weary of the information you get.  It seem like you have to do more research into your information to see if it is quality information or if it’s just fabricated.

            I am doing research into my family lineage right now, but around every corner, every person, and every page of information there is another twenty pages of information that I have to look at and ensure that it is from a legitimate source and that everything matches up with each record.  Most of the information I am looking at is from a legitimate source, but there are a few times that I have to cross check the information against three or four different records.  So were it only should have took me a few hours to complete this assignment, its taking a few days of staring endlessly at a computer screen.

            This makes for an interesting topic on that subject; just because it’s something we do now and don’t even realize how we do it.  We leave our digital marker online every day and in a multitude of ways.  Maybe we ought to rethink a lot of this because as I am doing research I am finding that just one written record is all I can find usually about a single person, or if it is more than one pieces its two; makes it hard to do accurate research with so many holes. 

            So, with all these missing files, burnt records, or incomplete documents; we should look not at the quality of what they did one hundred years ago, but how we should learn from their example and improve on it.  This will be the only way that our information of the present can better inform the people of the future.