Good Morning, One of the worst mistakes I occasionally see is where cousins, of the same name, are assigned the same wives, families, parents, etc. of their same named cousin. This can be very confusing and lead to what appears to be some very strange family alliances. A perfect example of this is in the family of George JORDAN I (ABT 1657-1718) and his wife, Mary BROWNE (ABT 1665-BEF 1704), of Southwark Parish, Surry County, VA. Some do not realize "old George" had more than one son. <grin> In fact, he had five sons by my count and several daughters. Naming patterns being what they were back then, you can almost bet that most of these sons named one of their sons after their father, George. So, what we end up with is lots of Georges in this JORDAN family. One of the errors I picked up with a little digging was the duplicate marriage that some show for George JORDAN, III (ABt 1720-1792) who married Patience WARREN, daughter of Benjamin WARREN and Rebecca WILKINS of Brunswick County, GA. Some researchers also show a second marriage for George III to a Hannah SMITH. I have nothing against George III marrying more than once but it was not this George. It was his first cousin, George, son of Arthur JORDAN, George II's (ABT 1685-1761) brother. This Arthur also married a Sarah LNU like his brother, George II, who married Sarah HUNT. I have nothing against the research of others, I use their research all the time. However, there are lots of errors in some of this material. This is why I am constantly updating my files with the correct information as I find it. When you have close to 30,000 people in your PAF -- that's a lot of work. However, it is very critical when you are hitting against a brick wall to know the family with which your family is collateral and who these families are collateral with because in all likelihood -- your bunch will come out of this overall extended family, somewhere. The problem comes in when you are working with a scenario that is not how you expect it to be because of incorrect data you have included in this scenario due to the research errors of others. This is what you have to minimize if you want to understand how your family interacted with other families during that period. Just remember this -- assignment mistakes are generally not made late -- within the past 100-150 years. The mistakes I see are early (before 1800) but these mistakes in assignment can have lasting effects on later assignments. It is like driving down the road and taking a wrong turn. Instead of ending up in Atlanta, GA -- you end up in Birmingham, AL. The real mistakes come in when researchers try to make Birmingham into Atlanta and they do it all the time. This all goes back to Clarke's First Rule of Genealogical Research -- "any assignment has to make sense." If it does not make sense it is probably incorrect, no matter what Aunt Sally or Uncle Bill told you or for that matter -- what some family genealogy book stated on page 212. Always remember this about family genealogy books. The reason they are published in the first place is so you will buy them at their usual exorbitant price and better yet -- if you will buy "version two," at a much more exorbitant price, which supposedly corrects all of the errors the author conveniently included in "version one." <grin> Researchers in Georgia, which includes a lot of DANIEL folks, put a lot of faith in Folks Huxford's, "Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia," abbreviated as POWG in most source material, but Judge Huxford made many mistakes in his published works but most of these mistakes were not of his own making because this was compiled genealogy and not researched information. When I say "compiled genealogy," I mean -- provided by the family. What Judge Huxford did not know or did not note in his books is that most families generally do not have a good understanding of their family ancestry past their great-grandfather, if that. This is why we find so many assignment errors in POWG. Any family genealogy book is just one thing -- a starting point, not an ending point. If you take it as the latter and not the former, you will, just like many others, end up in Birmingham and not Atlanta....... John R. Clarke Feel free to visit my website at: www.outdoorwriter.com