Wednesday, October 2, 2013
Why I Don't Do Family History
The church has invested time and money into making family history websites easier to use. This was a brilliant move and they succeeded in their goal. Unfortunately for me, however, family history never was hard for me because of interfaces that were difficult to use. My problem is that I hate stating things as fact unless I know they are. This comes from many simple rules of the programming world: never start coding without knowing what you will code and no software is bug free. So when I sit down to do family history and I come across conflicting records, I will probably end up doing nothing. This is a lousy excuse to not do my family history work and follow the prophet. I shouldn't be scared to enter information that might be inaccurate. Only a foolish manager would not release a product just because he isn't sure all the bugs have been fixed. I need to learn how to make decisions even if I don't know exactly what will happen if I take a certain action. If I can learn this, it will help me as a software developer, and more importantly, it will help me do my family history work.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Agreed, you need to do family history. But you need to do it like an engineer and list those conflicting sources and make a note about it. Someone later can then come and fix it if they have more information. You can think of it kind of like quicksort and you're just doing the first pass. Maybe later you'll fix mistakes later. Maybe somebody else will. Or maybe you'll find out later what you did was good enough ;-)
ReplyDeleteI love the honesty here. I'm the same way. I love reading stories, but I would like it even more if I could witness it for myself to verify.
ReplyDelete