Even though I haven’t used them much yet, I love the idea of blogging prompts, which GeneaBloggers runs every day.
One of the reasons I decided convinced myself to start “Beyond a Sapling” was because I knew if I lacked anything to write about, I could check the blog prompts for inspiration. And now that I’ve posted a few items, I’ve thought of a blog prompt of my own: Mistaken Monday.
Behind the Idea
It’s been a couple of weeks since I first thought of it as a blog prompt. What prompted the prompt idea was thinking back to how I had at one time found the wrong person for my second great grandfather, and how after adding his family and finding a photo of his sister, and telling family about these findings. Once I found I had the wrong person, I had to update my family that he wasn’t an ancestor after all, and I had wasted all that time working on the wrong person in my tree.
Prompt Material
“Mistaken Monday” doesn’t have to be about a mistake I’ve made. It can include any kind of mistake related to genealogy, including (but not limited to):
- Mistakes I’ve made in my tree (such as the wrong person, or a wrong relationship).
- Mistakes I’ve made in genealogy (such as a record I’m unable to find any source on).
- Mistakes in records I’ve found (such as multiple census records with different birth locations for a family member.
It doesn’t have to stop there. Mistakes are for learning and reflecting:
- How did I get specific misinformation into my tree? How can I avoid this in the future?
- How did I not add a source to this information? What steps can I take to ensure everything has a source?
- What reasons may there have been for records to be inconsistent?
The More the Merrier
Everyone makes mistakes. If you have any of your own, whether ones you made or found while working on your own genealogy blog, consider using that as the base of a prompted Monday “Mistaken Monday” post of your own.
I’ll be posting my first “Mistaken Monday” this upcoming Monday.