FOOTNOTES:
[1] Any person becomes entitled to the service described above for the period of one year, during which applications for advice may be made, by remittance of a fee of $25 to The Grafton Press, Genealogical and Biographical Department, 70 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
[2] A fee of $10 entitles one to the above service—that is, to a report, by the Genealogical and Biographical Department of The Grafton Press, on the references to a single family line in the New York libraries. Additional arrangements can be made for copying, etc. One fee covers the search under a single surname only.
III COMPILING
We will suppose that at last the task of investigation has come to an end. We have run our family lines back as far as our plan contemplated, or as far as we were able to do with a reasonable amount of research. Perhaps most of them go back to the original emigrants, but it may be that in a case or two we have had the good fortune to make connection with an old family stem in Europe. In any case, the work is now done. We have made our discoveries, and scored triumphs not a few. But though the excitement of the chase is over, its pleasures are by no means spent. Is there no story to tell, no tale of our difficulties and exploits? Next to the exhilaration of the hunt itself, what can compare with the mellow joy of going over it with a comrade! Least of all can the "inevitable narrative" be spared in a case of ancestry-hunting. It is the logical issue of the search, and failure to weave our facts into a readable story, after having collected them, is almost unthinkable.
Having piloted the reader safely hitherto, we must now faithfully warn against pernicious ways, even though it should involve criticism of many of the genealogical books which have appeared in print. The truth is that in the great majority of such works we look in vain for the proofs of the statements made. Authorities are not given and we do not find systematic footnotes, nor even ordinary citations of authorities in the text. We have nothing better than our own guess to enable us to decide whether the compiler is giving us the fruit of original research, an extract from another compilation, unsupported tradition, or a mere conjecture.
This is most unfortunate, for a genealogical chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Suppose that we have tested one of the statements in such a book by our own original investigations and find it to be erroneous. How can we feel sure that the next statement may not be equally unreliable? The whole book therefore becomes discredited in our eyes. With genealogists everywhere at work, the errors in such volumes are bound to be discovered, and made public.
Any degree of confidence which we can allow ourselves in such cases depends upon the reputation of the compiler. But no man is infallible, and how can we know that the author's methods were such as to reduce his errors to a minimum? It may be that our own family line has been treated in such a book, that we have personal knowledge of the compiler, and are well satisfied as to his carefulness and accuracy. But can we expect others to have this same faith? How are they to be convinced that our family history is correctly given in a book of mere assertions, backed up by no display of authority?