By Joe Garonzik
Answer the following questions either True or False:
- No genealogical research is ever complete unless it has been authenticated by original source records.
- Salt Lake City is not the site of the greatest collection of accessible genealogical records in the U.S.
- The National Archives in Washington, D.C. is only one of many genealogy record repositories to be found in the nation’s capital.
If you answered false to any of these statements, you should read on. Why? In the first instance, it is an axiom of genealogy that all family research must ultimately be validated against original sources (or facsimiles of those sources on microfilm, etc.). How else can a researcher ever know that his data wasn’t derived from a mis-copied record, or that a lineage published in a book is simply incorrect?