The best genealogy websites may not be the largest, particularly those solely based upon records from the National Archives. Afterall, there are also State and County records, personal records, diaries, cemeteries, bibles, and all sorts of possibilities which are not cataloged for the average user. Too, the many family histories written during the first part of the 18th and 19th centuries. You just have to find them.
Down through the ages, records have disappeared, or were destroyed in wars, and other disasters. I think of some of the oldest court houses in Georgia and the evidence of a stove heated by coal chunks in the winter, and cooled by rans during summer months. Storage in those old buildings ultimately resulted in dampened documents eaten away by time itself. Once, while at the archives scanning old records, an observer noticed that the written script was faded in different sections of the page. She thought that was deliberate. However, it was the India ink which was preserved on parts of the page, doubtless due to dampness. It is not uncommon to see pages which were once readable, to a blank product. Suffice it to say, that the texture of the India ink and the colonial-style of writing prevented much decay. Believe me, I have seen many a blank page in county records! You can visit almost any old court house today and view the words lost by time.
One wonders if there is a survival rate for the Internet? Is it the means to preservation, or to invention? Programs are being written today which enable the writer to introduce a few words and let the program write the script. Will our future bring about conclusions using artificial intelligence? In other words, will a program, which is fed certain facts, reach conclusions concerning the lives of our ancestors, including birth and death dates, marriages, where buried, etc.? And if the algorithms exist in genealogy, how will we go about preserving actual truth?
For quick answers, everyone seemed to flock towards the DNA tests which are anything but completely accurate. But did that settle it? There is a massive invisible record to which we are not privy. Our records, had they survived, would begin with Noah, Ham, Jepheth and Seth. Other than Adam and Eve, before the Flood, there exists no possibility of kinship. Irrespective of whether or not you believe the Flood story, the fact of an earth once swallowed up by water killed all living things, means that the waters rose and buried all of the evidence.
However, there is also a mega-gap between about 5000 B.C. and 1066 A. D. No records! Oh, there are books written concerning speculations surrounding the lifestyles of Egyptian and resulting culture and histories based upon pyramids and tombs. Also, over different time-periods, archaeologists attempt to date items found in the soil and construct a culture therefrom. But no discernible written records. As our only written evidence, we have the pictorials in the Egyptian pyramids and the glyphs in South America,
Wars were fought, civilizations disappeared, cities sank into the oceans, and thousands upon thousands of people lived and died. Therefore, when we arrive at 1066 A. D. and the Domesday Book as the only surviving record to that point, only a speck of memory proves that innumerable ages did in fact once exist.
When the Dawes Rolls were introduced to allow survivors of the Cherokee Indians to have free land in Oklahoma (ca 1903), the quest was to prove 1/32nd blood kin. Over 33,000 applications were presented, yet only a tiny percentage of persons qualified. Let’s see, how many drops of blood is 1/32nd of 100, and how would that establish any real kinship? Therefore, the DNA tests, although interesting, are flawed in the absence of all drops of (the blood of all possible kin being counted in the analysis.
It is enough to say that we are European or African, just as much as it is to say that we are Irish, or English.