Claudia C. Breland writes: “In my 10 years as a professional genealogist, working with hundreds of clients and thousands of records, I have learned a lot about judging the quality of a source. Genealogists know that the closer a record is to the event in question, the more likely it is to be accurate. Original documents with primary information are best; sources with secondary information need to be explored further. Sometimes you will have several sources that record the same information—but on digging deeper, you might find that the information is in fact, incorrect.”