Genealogy - When is it history or just family legend??

  This weekend I finally finished reviewing a genealogy that a distant cousin wrote, and sent it back to my uncle.  It was a frustrating experience!!  There was so much that could have been really interesting and very good, but it all fell apart due to lousy methodology. 

The basic fault was that there was no attempt to publish or attribute the sources of the various stories, photos, and scanned documents. Further the "compiler" had basically cut and pasted all these various items together without any real attempt at generating a rigorous family history. There were photos in there that I would have loved to get copies of, but there was no indication of where the photos came from or who owned them.  Likewise for some of the narratives that were directly cut and pasted from other people's writings.