Tongue slightly in cheek, but there are a few grains of painful truth below
- Give your thread a really vague title like ‘family research’ or ‘looking for a grave’ or 'help wanted'
- Don’t mention the name of the person you are looking for until you have been asked at least three times
- Post your query to the wrong county forum
- Cross-post it to several different forums
- Insist that the spelling you found in one record is the only correct one
- Insist that spelling is significant
- Don’t include any dates
- Don’t include any places
- Accept that the transcriptions on Ancestry are accurate
- Imagine that the contributed listings in the IGI are 100% correct
- Don’t look up anything on Scotland’s People
- Believe what you find in online trees, even when you have conflicting evidence
- Assume that because you can only find one possible candidate in the records, it has to be the right person
- Keep secret most of the information you already have until after other people have found the same information, then tell them you knew it all along
- Post another thread about the same family a week later to make sure that people duplicate each other’s work
- Complain about the cost of getting information from Scotland’s People, especially when the corresponding office in your home country charges several times as much for a certificate and you have to wait for it to arrive by post
- Look on a 21st century main road atlas for the tiny croft where your ancestors lived in the 18th century
- Find on a map a place five counties away from the tiny croft where your ancestors lived, assume that because it has the same name it’s the right place, and resist all efforts to tell you otherwise
- Don’t ever say thank you when people help you
- Fail to realise that when people look things up for you on Scotland’s People, they have actually paid out their own cash to do so
