Talk:International Genealogical Index
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This is just personal impressions & conjectures, but it may be verifiable by looking outside Mormon resources: if it is true, someone serious about genealogy or historiography should have done some rigorous research on it.
In a word, IMO IGI (cited e.g. in Jane Lane, Lady Fisher) is valueless for learning facts and should be used only for suggesting directions for research: a large fraction of what is true is going to be there, but mixed with a great deal of speculation, and not much help telling them apart.
Surely a lot of bad genealogical research is done elsewhere, but two factors are, as i understand it, special abt IGI:
- A lot of Mormons don't start genealogical research until they have begun worrying about dying, and
- They have every reason to risk a lot of false positives in an effort to avoid any false negatives: up to the limit where they can afford the fees to turn more possible ancestors into good Mormons, why not include everyone with any name corresponding to the unchecked or unfinished branches of their pedigree chart? Leaving them out just bcz you're not sure means that when you get to heaven, some of your ancestors probably aren't going to be there for the big reunion, bcz you didn't buy the ceremonies for them that you could have, because you weren't casting your nets widel enough.
In my mind, the Morman microfilms of the primary resources (birth and marriage records) are a class-I resource, but extending that sense of indispensible and sound records to IGI is tempting but horribly mistaken. Don't add that to the article on my say so, but if studies have been done of false-connection stats in IGI, they can be found and their results should IMO be cited.
--Jerzy•t 06:29, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
