Saturday, December 12, 2009

Here's an example of the problem


Luetta McAllister Hall was born in 1904, married Henry Vernon Hall in the St. George, Utah, temple in 1923, and was killed in an automobile accident in 1933 near Rawlins, Wyoming. She is buried in the Hurricane, UT cemetery.
Various people have submitted misleading and incorrect versions of this information. According to the submissions (you can get on Family Search and check this out yourself) resulting from a search, she is married to Vern Hall and to Richard Heaton (one of her sisters actually married Richard). She died some time between 3 and 10 September 1933 and is buried in a variety of places in Utah and Wyoming. WORSE YET, she has had her temple work, that she did herself while alive, done again by proxy over the last few years (hopefully to the correct person, but judging from the submitted information, likely not).
How do we prevent this?
Perhaps it is too much to think that we can eliminate the shoddy research and sloppy submissions of others. But here is where we can have an affect. We can submit GEDCOM files with the truth AFTER carefully documenting the key dates and information. We can share the information we upload and eventually the weight of our well-done submissions will pull searches in the right direction. And possibly we can start spending time in the temple doing work for people that have not yet had the chance and need it.
It will be fun to meet Lue. She was the oldest in Richard Samuel's "second" family (he had married and had two daughters before his first wife died and he went on a mission). After meeting at Dixie College, their courtship was conducted primarily via post as Vern herded sheep for money to go to school and then headed to Logan. Since she was four years younger than him, she would address her letters to "Dear Old Vern."

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