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Tioga and Bradford Counties in PA and Chemung County in NY Warning & Disclaimer This page is part of the
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Census takers had handwriting as poor as any of us, and we do our best to transcribe their records as well as we can. They made mistakes and we do too. The published histories that we present on this site have errors -blatant mistakes - of the type that any researcher makes even now. Additionally the traditions of earlier times caused writers to idealize their times, to discount or eliminate information about women and minorities or to portray them through the filter of bias and stereotype. We present this to you as the best that we have available. It is your job, as a researcher, to evaluate this material and make sense of it.
My own opinion is that making these records available to the genealogical community, particularly to those who can not come here to actually search through the cemeteries and other resources, is a service that has value. While I regret any imperfect work that does exist on these pages, I trust that the sophisticated researcher will understand the possibility of error and will eventually check original resources to resolve any potential conflicts that may arise. As with any material, it adds to the clues that you have to work with and will eventually be an aid to you at arriving as close to truth as you can get.
In a project of this magnitude, perfection is certainly a goal and an ideal, but it is not achievable in a realistic sense. The alternative is to do nothing or to do very little, screening out all but the proven items. I do not have the resource to collect, dispense, and administer this resource and still confirm that everything on it is absolutely true. It represents the efforts of many people over a wide span of time each of whom has contributed her or his very best, and I am passing it on to you as well as I can. So, be warned, and use the resources accordingly, with due caution. Many dedicated persons helping me have made these materials available to you. We give all of this as a gift to you. We appreciate your thanks as that is our only payment, and we appreciate that you will not be critical of errors, some of which are ours, and some of which we carry on from our predecessors.
Joyce M. Tice, (founder and developer of the Tri-County Genealogy and History Sites of Joyce M. Tice)
Comment from a guest November 2005
Joyce;
I agree with your premise. It isn't just retranscribing cemetery records the
introduce errors. I am in the extended process of transcribing the head stones
in our local cemetery, our gen soc spent several days transcribing the info, I
then entered it in a database. I took section one galley and error checed it To
my dissapointment my database was riddled with errors. I noted these and made
the corrections. Last summer we rechecked my transcription and I still had over
two dozen errors in section one. I finally have had to accept that I will never
get it error free.
Les Chapman
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