I think that far too often we are distracted when we are working on most things in our lives that we don’t fully focus on what we should be. While bikepacking with my family this summer, I came across this sign, 4 days later when we were passing this same town on our way home there was a similar sign. It was obviously not a road, but is part of the I&M Canal Path. It appears as if too often people are paying too much attention to their GPS and not the road. (Note the single track down the middle and the narrow passage next to the utility pole.)

**I&M Canal Path near Illini State Park**

When I am doing research or look at what others have put together, I always verify the information that they give me, as too often people are careless or do not fully vet the information that they are gathering. Are we making assumptions about those we come across? Are we finding someone with a similar name in a document and assuming it is the person we are looking for?

For a project my senior year in high school, I did a family history project on the David Newton Dague family. I assumed that the child, Shirle was female. Shirle was born in 1881 and died in 1897, so did not appear in any available U.S. Census record. Besides family records, I had some pages from Carrie M. Dague’s The history and genealogy of the Dague family and on page 168 she has the spelling of the name as Shirley. I think it was a novices mistake that my 17-year old self made to assume that a Shirle/Shirley was female and not having seen the movie Airplane. If I had been careful I would have also realized that on the same page, she lists my great-aunt Joann as John. Thankfully, it was not a generational connection, so did not send me branching off into someone else’s tree.

It wasn’t until 2014 when I was researching this line some more, that I came upon a newspaper article indicating that the son of David Dague had passed away that I corrected my mistake.