This site will contain documents, pictures, and sounds related to research on the history and genealogy of the Albro family. Anyone can provide material, (and we hope you will!) but like any journal, it will be reviewed before being posted. All research must include source information. If copyrighted material is included, the author must have obtained permission from the copyright holder to post the material, and evidence of that permission must be provided to the site owner, Phil Albro. Information about living persons should not be provided without their written permission. Some suggested research might include a description of a personal visit to a cemetery with photographs of the monuments, abstracts or transcripts of wills or other court documents made personally, a survey of literature on some aspect of the Albro family, a portrait of an ancestor drawn from a published description, old photographs not previously published, information obtained personally from National, State, County or local community archives, a personal impression of what one of the historic (pre- photography) Albros might have looked like, even "historical novel" – type material describing what life might have been like for one of the historical Albro families. Whatever. By the way, we do need something that says your submission is for publication.
The intention is to add new knowledge about the Albro family to everyone's information base, not to promulgate information already easily available on the Internet. Extracting and organizing the Albro-specific parts of larger databases can also be useful. An important aspect is to acknowledge that the female line of descent is certainly just as genetically significant as the male, and surnames are not magic words. A secondary purpose is to help researchers learn to do thorough research and build healthy scepticism.
All submissions should be sent by email to: .
All submissions will be considered to be copyrighted by the submitter but with permission to post it here being implied; anything on this site that is not stated to be otherwise is copyright © 2000 Phil Albro. We have no objection to your copying, downloading, or capturing anything on this site for your personal use. All commercial use of material from this site is prohibited. We object strongly to your downloading anything, CHANGING IT, and making it available with a citation claiming it is what we said. If you download something that someone else submitted to us, it would be nice if you gave them credit for it when you use it.
So your name is not Albro and none of your ancestors were named Albro? You’re wondering why you should bother to read all this stuff about Albros? How about this – you are probably working on your family tree, or else why would you be visiting a genealogy site? You have had dozens of "hits" in your Internet searches, from LDS records, online gedcoms, other family tree sites, etc. By using that information you have been able to fill in lots of blanks in your database. But you just might be starting to wonder - how much of that information is correct? How much is just someone's guesswork? You may even have found information that disagrees with information you had previously. I would be willing to bet that whatever your name might be, if you keep searching long enough you are bound to find some contradictions in the claims about your ancestors. Yet each of the claims is presented as though it were the obvious and irrefutable truth. What's going on?
The sad fact is, people DO guess a lot to fill in their blanks. They DO tend to list the first claim they run into without checking its sources. They DO tend not to keep researching a given "link" once the blanks are all filled in. These documents, especially the "Controversies" articles, show examples of what you may have to do to gather all available information about a claim, and illustrate how you may have to make a tentative choice among unprovable options. They show examples of the reasoning one can use to help make those choices. These documents will show you some of the realities of genealogical research with no fairy tale endings. Hopefully, they will make you alert to the need for caution and skepticism when you encounter these too-good-to-be-true chains of ancestors in free-for-the-downloading trees, or even in books. Besides, some of the stories are interesting.
This web site is not for commercial use and will not sell, rent, lease, loan, or give data about its visitors to anyone. The site currently attempts to determine which browser a given visitor is using so it can select the right version of the menu page. It does not store or record that information. It is possible that at some time in the future it may be necessary to determine the window size and/or Java capability of the browser being used. If this should be the case, that information will also not be stored or recorded. Visitors who submit data for publication are asked whether they want to be able to be contacted through email by other visitors. Their preferences are respected.
Genealogical research is sometimes considered a "soft science". A soft science is one that accepts a higher level of subjectivity in interpretations than what is acceptable in a "hard science." Those of you who have visited The Albro Journal previously know that we do not see any reason why genealogical research should be associated with any less objectivity than chemistry or physics. That being the case, we would like to state that, while the Albro Journal is not affiliated with any genealogical organization, we strongly endorse the principles stated in the Standards of the National Genealogical Society, quoted below by permission.
P.Albro and G.Silverman
Genealogical Standards