I'm posting this as a warning to those people who are researching the surname of Dierdorff. I have discovered first hand that some of the web sources mentioned on the internet are not reliable, and in some cases contain fabricated information regarding our branch of the Dierdorff family.

Three years ago I was contacted by hobbyistabout my step-great grandfather, Henery Beecher Dierdorff. The "genetleman" was designing a web site and was authoring a book on the family. I provided some information on Beecher, which the recipient quickly told me was incorrect. Since I was going on original Dierdorff papers and bibles, I was taken aback.

Two years ago, I discovered that this person had up loaded his information into Family Tree Maker, Ancestry.com AND the LDS family file, as well as his own web site. While some of the information was correct, this person had arbitraily renamed several of Beecher's children by his first marriage and then fabricated everything about my great-grandmother's relationship with Beecher -- even discounting her family and placing her death 150 miles from where it actually occurred. Other errors included moving cities in Ohio to counties in which it is impossible for them to be.

The bottom line is that two years after notifying the LDS (I supplied them with copies of legal documents, birth certificates and obituaries) site and the submitter, I am still cleaning this mess up.

I understand that genealogy is a hobby, but we all know what its like to search and search and search then finally get a lead that is the word of someone else. Once we allow ourselves to blindly accept what self appointed authorities say is fact without verifying the information, the validity of what we work on is shattered.

Please, please, please verify any information that you come across on the web. A little mis-information can do a lot of damage.