Wishing you great success on your genealogical journey, accurately piecing together your family tree! Sometimes we all have to be Click-any-[TRUE-FACT]-ologists coinciding with careful fact-checking via surviving documents, a majority of which are digitized online, many at Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org. (The drawback of trees posted on FamilySearch.org is everyone is editor & anyone can make changes to the ancestors in your tree, concept is every individual is only entered once. Yet at Ancestry.com, you choose if & with whom you share editorial access, ensuring ancestors & facts & relationships & timelines your tree doesn’t change unless you want it to.) The great thing about Ancestry.com is they’ve added the ability to attach online documents to every fact in the tree, (so has FamilySearch.org) so you can factually prove each relationship (marriage & births & deaths) with a document (sometimes, prior to official government certificates, proofs exist in Deeds or in Probate actions in lieu of a Will, or via a Bible Record confirmed by witnessing marriages, or lots of variables like that. (I’m currently attaching proof documents in the private tree I’m building prior to releasing it to the public.)
Here’s the specific foundational research methodology info that may help you. I am working toward AG accreditation (https://www.icapgen.org/), and in the meantime, I started this little website to aid my family (& friends & colleagues) in basic training on how to do genealogy research for those who’ve said: “I want to help you but I don’t know how & can you teach me!?” On my website, among other things, I’ve linked some video tutorials by the Ancestry.com corporate trainer, Crista Cowan. She’s an amazing teacher & she has made well over 300 videos, so I picked out the very best, the most basic ones, to make an easy user-friendly way to establish clear guidelines & a strong foundation in the Genealogical Proof Standard (basically how to be a detective & lawyer to build an accurate strong case that would meet proof requirements of any lineage society). I’ve also written articles on my own research experiences, giving basic how-to info.
In my own ancestry, I’ve been fighting a tidal wave of erroneous myths that have been prolifically published as fact, in which multiple people (&/or couples, &/or families) have been erroneously blended/conflated into one, then posted far-and-wide on multiple websites & even published in official county cemetery & history books. What a shame! I have the proofs separating these erroneously conflated Herndons & am doing my best to get the word out via every means available to me. To correct the problem, I’ve had to become a fun, but sometimes tedious, combo-Sherlock-Holmes-and-Perry-Mason to root through it all, to build the court-worthy interlaced wall of evidential & collective-linked circumstantial proofs that would be needed to prove true identity to a jury.
Utilization of the Genealogical Proof Standard is the only way to accuracy & truth. Crista Cowan’s amazing videos explain the incremental steps for the GPS standard, breaking them down into bite-sized, understandable chunks. She is VERY knowledgeable & her demeanor is very animated & fun like a good friend, so her video tutorials are very fun to watch so I HIGHLY recommend her free training. Here’s my foundational & supplemental training.
This little WordPress website (https://familydisambiguation.wordpress.com/?order=asc) is a preliminary foundation and will guide you to the most helpful tutorials (roughly 14-40 minutes, averaging about 20-30 minutes each). After savoring the foundation, getting the basic info via this blogging website, you can also go directly to Crista’s YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/CristaCowan/playlists). After Crista’s you can go the Ancestry YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/Ancestrycom/playlists). Another excellent free genealogy education resource is via the five years of archived videos at the RootsTech website (https://www.rootstech.org/video-archive2?lang=eng). Now, coming in just three weeks, for the first time ever, no doubt due to the lockdowns, the annual international RootsTech Conference, usually held in Salt Lake City, will be streamed entirely free online, for three days only, during February 25-27, 2021. See info on homepage (https://www.rootstech.org/?lang=eng) & register here (https://www.rootstech.org/rootstech-connect-2021-registration?lang=eng), to see details, go to menu tab & click on Virtual Event.
Enjoy! Happy Learning & Happy Hunting!
Blessings,
Rose
Family Disambiguation Station 
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