Are you confident of the accuracy of your genealogy data? You might be amazed at how many databases I see that include mothers giving birth at the age of eight, marriages at age twelve, or deaths at the age of 135. Sometimes you even find a person with a birth date prior to those of the parents. Download almost any GEDCOM file from the Internet and I suspect you can find similar problems.
Such errors are easy to create. Sometimes selecting the wrong person in original records can cause such errors. Copying someone else's errors can cause other errors. Mistakes also occur because you had a keystroke error when entering the data; attempting to type 1835 on the keyboard can easily result in 1845 being pressed on the keys.
I found such errors in my own database some time ago when I checked. This was embarrassing at the time, but I am very glad that I ran an automated process looking for possible inaccuracies. The sanity check process quickly identified records that I needed to reexamine, records that I might not have noticed otherwise. Luckily, it is easy to check your entire database for obvious errors, whether you have 200 people or 200,000 in your files. For me, the entire process required about two minutes to check the records of nearly 4,000 people.
All of today's better genealogy programs have a "sanity check" report although not all of them use that exact term. It might be called a "Potential Problems Report" or "Problem List" or "Audit Report." Whatever the name, most other high-quality genealogy programs have something that checks for obvious errors, such as recording your father's birth 100 years before his grandmother.
I recently checked someone else's genealogy database with Legacy, a very popular genealogy program for Windows. I received the other database in GEDCOM format.
I first created a new, empty database in Legacy and then imported the GEDCOM file. This created a Legacy database of the other person's genealogy data. Then all I had to do was click on Legacy's Potential Problems report.
A rather large menu appeared, offering many options. I could adjust the number of years in several areas, such as "Warn if born when parents are under 13 years old." I found that I could change the age of 13 to any number I wished. There were similar options for minimum age at marriage, maximum age at death, birth after a certain number of years of marriage, age of mother at time of birth, and more. The same menu also has options for checking for illegal characters in names, situations in which the husband and wife had the same birth surname (not married name) and also to check if the child was born before the marriage of the parents. These last three are simple off/on checkboxes.
I used all the normal defaults and clicked on PREVIEW in order to see the information on the screen. I could have clicked on PRINT if I wished. Less than two minutes later I had a list of potential problems, including one case of a child being born after the death date of the mother. Obviously, the source of that information has to be checked again. The same routine also found two instances of a child being born more than twenty years after the parents' marriage date. Such a late birth certainly is possible, but it is unusual. In such cases, a double-check of the records is advisable.
I would suggest that you run a similar "sanity check" on your genealogy data. It is very easy to accomplish. It only takes a few minutes and might save you a lot of embarrassment in future years.
Have you performed a sanity check on your genealogy information?
