Cynthia Herrin is responsible for a number of genealogy records collections for various locations, but it's believed that at least one of them is not credible, namely "Edgecombe County, North Carolina Vital Records, 1720-1880" aka "Early Families of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, Its Past and Present". According to Cynthia, she had found an old genealogy book relating to Edgecombe County, NC, compiled all the data from it and submitted it to Ancestry.com, who accepted it. She then supposedly threw the original book away, claiming it was in poor condition whenever anyone asked her to produce the source and prove her information was reliable. The original book has never been found anywhere else, even by the expert researches at Edgecombe County Genealogy Society.
See this topic for more info. Therefore, there is no evidence that this information is reliable.
She claimed the same type of thing with a book called "Bertie Beginnings: The Story of Our County and Its Distinguished Citizens" -
see this topic at RootWeb for more info.
And with one called "Our Pioneers: Families of Early Oakland County, Michigan".
See this topic for more info.
Most of these have since been wisely removed from Ancestry.com but Cythnia is also responsible for
this Fayette County, PA collection which still remains on Ancestry.com. It should probably be removed.
Please comment below if you know of any other dubious collections Cynthia Herrin was responsible for and I will add them to the list.
Thanks for letting us know about these book Cynthia claims to have had. I wondered about a lot of the data she has out there on Ancestry. I found lots of error she has on my ancestors from Fayette county, PA.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you about this Cynthia claims. I am unable to confirm what she has that ancestry list. Also the link to see this topic at Rootsweb for more inform on the "Bertie Beginnings: Story of our County and its Distinguished citizens" is broken. thanks
ReplyDeleteNot surprising since I posted this 5 years ago. It also looks like Ancestry has since removed the Fayette County, PA collection. Hopefully all of Cynthia's collections have been eradicated from the internet and no long exist so the discussions about it won't matter anymore either.
DeleteDO NOT USE DATA POSTED ON ANCESTRY AS FACTUAL RESEARCH!!!!
ReplyDeleteAncestry allows data to be posted with no research information given to support the posts. At best, you can use the data simply as a hint.
If you mean the user trees on Ancestry, that is true for any family tree, not just at Ancestry. Any family tree can include errors, even ones with sources cited. But the vast majority of record collections on Ancestry are reliable resources - they have been removing more and more of the index collections like this that come from dubious sources.
Delete