Source:Virginia, United States. Virginia, Compiled Marriages, 1740-1850

Usage Tips

• WARNING: the Virginia marriage databases online at Ancestry contains some serious errors. The information originally came from Broderbund, Inc., which was purchased by Genealogy.com, which was purchased by Ancestry.com. The current information at Ancestry.com does not always match the original information from the Broderbund CDs.

This collection of marriage records includes the names of over 300,000 men and women supposedly married in the state of Virginia between 1740 and 1850, compiled from a variety of sources, including user-submitted information. Sources are not provided.

Ancestry.com. Virginia Marriages, 1740-1850 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 1999. Original data: Dodd, Jordan R., et al.. Early American Marriages: Virginia to 1850. Bountiful, UT, USA: Precision Indexing Publishers.

Transcription errors are common in any transcription, especially when the materials used have gone through multiple transcriptions. More concerning is whether this source was based (in part or wholly) on user-submitted information.

Ancestry's description of the data base says only

Throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, Virginia was one of the most populous states in the Union, being home to as many as 1.2 million persons at any one time. This collection of marriage records includes the names of over 300,000 men and women married in the state between 1740 and 1850. In addition to providing the names of bride and groom, researchers will find the date of marriage and county in which the ceremony was performed. For those seeking married ancestors from Virginia, this database can be a valuable source of information.

Typically, when Ancestry (or Family Search for that matter) knows that a data base includes users supplied information, they will include a warning of some sort. When they know it is based on original source records, they'll say that it derived from original source records Here they say nothing, which probably means they don't know. That's consistent with the WeRelate warning above--except that the WeRelate warning adds that the database is baed (at least in part) on user supplied information.

My question is "How do you know the it is based (at least in part) on user supplied information?

I image that it is, given Ancestry's statement that does not address the issue, but how did you get from their statement to the conclusion that it does include information from non-original sources?

Q 14:30, 11 February 2023 (UTC)