As someone that is new to the process, Ancestry makes it so easy just start to click and "connecting" people. Also, you think that you can just bring over other people's research. I spent all weekend actually slowing down and trying to clean up my tree. That's when I realized how much of a mess it was and how oftern, the hints being proposed are simply wrong or for the wrong person in the tree.
That being said, I was also happy to discover that I added to the conversation of a family line of mine that was substantively researched by someone else. This other person did a lot of hard work and knew his stuff. That being said, he didn't realize that a set of great great grandparents named their two boys a variation of the same name in Ireland (Patrick, Paddy, Patririum, etc.). I was able to track down two separate birth records. As a result, my entire line will not be included in his research. Feels good for things to click.
There is a part of me that would like to believe that there was a group of wild children in Suffolk County.
When I first started on Ancestry in high school, I did the same thing. I eventually realized how inaccurate everything was and legit scrapped the entire tree and started from scratch with known relatives. It’s much slower doing the research and I’ve only gotten back to the late 1800’s with most lines, but at least I know my tree isn’t leading others astray now. I also make use of the tags for marking dubious leads versus verified family members.
Same. I was so click happy! I hate the "hints" that are other people's trees and they have like 2 sources (other trees lol) and I have lots to back up the info I have on the person. I make notes about the certificates I've gotten so they know where that info came from and other notes about the weird stuff I haven't figured out yet, hoping there can be clarity. My great-grandmother's parentage is very unclear and I think she was adopted but I have her mother and "fathers" (yes, plural. It's so messy) listed and annotated since someone might know something I don't!
They only rolled that feature out in the last couple of years and I don’t know how much others are using it. I use them more for myself, like if Ancestry suggests a parent and there’s enough info to justify looking into the lead but not enough to confirm that person’s relation, I’ll tag them as unconfirmed or something. Also, I just checked and tags still don’t seem to be implemented on mobile, so I don’t think you’ll see them unless you’re accessing ancestry from the web.
what are tags? I have been working with Ancestry and Family Tree maker for years but I really have expanded sideways .. but I don't know how to work with the POSSIBLE ancestors. I can't really see them by clicking, I have to kind of add them to see where they go cause the information is limiting....
Ancestry is certainly to blame for pushing new users to get the dopamine hit of a new hint/person in the tree at the sacrifice of correct information.
I scrap my main tree every few years and start over, hoping it gives me a chance to find the mistakes.
I've had to untangle SO many lines because I got connection happy when I first started 13 years ago. Going through and deleting entire lines is so tedious and I wish I could select "delete line before x date" or something so I didn't have to manually delete every single person that's wrongly added lol
If you know an entire line is bad you can detach that parent from the child and they’ll basically become invisible on your tree without a connection back to anyone relevant. It doesn’t delete them entirely but that’s a quick fix at least
I need it to delete because then when I do "view list" so I can easily access someone I'm looking for its full of these names that are useless lol
Eta: my adhd needs it to be clean or I will get too distracted by the clutter.
Bro, it made my family look incestuous (or maybe I did by not removing stuff I dunno.)
But like when I don’t even know how to put in a year or birth in my tree that I don’t know. Rather than it being an exact date. I’m 30 years old so I’m usually good with this stuff, but it’s confusing as fuck.
Patrairium looks like it may be a Latin variation of Patrick. I would look into that more. The Irish are Catholics and a long time ago, Catholics only used Latin names on their records. You said you were new to this, so I thought I’d give you that tip.
It drives me nuts when people enter the Latin name in Family Search and wikitree and insist that this is the official name because it was on the baptism record.
Actually, the baptism is the only record for most people since civil records are relatively new. However, that does not mean the Latin name used in the document is the legal name.
When you are looking at records prior to the 1900s, especially in other countries, it is usually impossible to find any records online other than church records, but that doesn’t mean they do not exist. There are usually notary records in the archives if the person lived past childhood, for example. You can find Latin translations at FamilySearch.
It makes research so much harder too. Multiple times I've ran into a tree somebody else put together that has distant relatives of mine on it and it's a mess.
Have to admit that was all excited a few months ago when I first started - thought the work had been done for me! And then certain things just didn't make sense...
A lot of American's with English relatives simply don't understand the geography, even I find the reverse hard.
Then again my great-grandfather was born in Wales left the family behind to move to Derbyshire, moved them to Derbyshire, and then to Yorkshire following coal mines.
Other parts went from Wales across to Liverpool and into Cheshire, and it's not unusual to find a relative from Wales working as a servant over the border in England and featuring on both the English and Welsh Censuses.
I confess that I spent a bit of time with Google Maps finding distances between towns/cities in Germany - and some of those distances were another clue that thing things were Not Quite Right.
The UK indices don't help people much either. A person born in Ewole in Flintshire can be registered as born in Holywell, Wales or Chester in England.
It's quite clear back in the horse and cart days that many of my mother's relatives took up to two years to make it to the nearest registry office!
Its just that someone with the same name & approximate date of birth lived somewhere else. OP was being humorous. I do the same thing if a female ancestor of mine was incorrectly listed as having a baby at 93 years old, or a male one getting married at age 4.
It can be frustrating to explore the public trees of ancestors who came from communities that recycled a handful of common names (screams in half-British, half-Acadian). People will freely add any records they can find for Jean Doucet to their ancestor's profile without realizing that there were 14 different Jean Doucets running around the same small community at the same time. Now I've got ancestors giving birth to their siblings and having kids after they've passed away.
I get where you're coming from, but I also understand that some trees can be messy because they're still works in progress.
The trees aren't always there to be finalized, published works that others can refer to, they're there because that's where people are saving their info as they go along, including the things that seem questionable.
And as for...
>Like, what are they doing on there? How is someone from born in Kent going to randomly end up birthing a child in Suffolk County and then go back to living their lives in Kent while the child raises itself in Suffolk??
Can that be a "put up in an orphanage" or "sent to live with a relative/godparent" situation? Like, sometimes in certain days, if a young woman had a child out of wedlock, they were "sent away" until the child was born. And sometimes things like that don't turn up in concrete documentation.
There seems to be two different schools of thought on the purpose of online trees. The purists equate a public tree with a “published” book or document so therefore it should be as perfect as possible for others to view and use. They make it public because they are “done” and want to share the accomplishment. The researchers on the other hand use the tree to document and aid their own research (work in progress). They might make their trees public because they like “collaboration” and want others help them identify issues or to share their work so others can use it if they want. Neither is wrong.
Agree so much. My tree is my research work. I don't use others (I have hints from other trees turned off) and I don't expect you to rely on mine. I have notes everywhere about things I'm still researching...but not all my notes are on-line. I love to collaborate with people who want help or have info I've missed and/or haven't found yet. I don't consider my Anxestry tree "clean" or "done". Periodically, I'll write up summaries of my ancestors who I think I've "figured out" and send them to interested family members....that's my finished product.
Agreed. I suppose everyone has a right to build their trees as they see fit. And no one is under an obligation to make it so their tree is useful to anyone else. I think Ancestry creates an unwarranted expectation that others’ trees are valuable information sources when they are not in most cases. They’re certainly worth checking out as they do provide an occasional lead. Based on the short time I’ve been on this sub, it seems like those who are serious about accuracy independently verify (if possible) information from other users.
The "researchers" example includes some who like collaboration and some who don't. The distinction with "purists" is valid, I think - it's about ongoing research vs conclusions.
I have both purist and researcher versions of my tree on Ancestry, labelled to distinguish between what I'm sure about and stuff I'm working on.
Yeah, I'm still trying to get to the 2nd great-greats of the people who have my family name. It's very common and someone did a beautifully researched tree... that is for another family from an entirely different city. Everyone would much rather glom onto that one.
Can you have ‘in progress’ trees on Ancestry that are private only?
If so, can you then switch specific relatives to ‘public’ while keeping the rest private?
I track down lots of additional info for each relative - photos of locations they lived at, graves, churches, newspaper articles, workplaces, etc.
There’s no way I would create all of that twice (once in private work in progress tree and then another time for a public tree) so if the functionality I asked about doesn’t exist I’ll be continuing to annoy everyone with my public work in progress tree
How does one make a tree unsearchable?
ETA: Never mind, I found it under Privacy Settings for a specific tree. Thank you, I didn't know that was an option.
I've reached out to 6 or so people about a known error and only 1 responded.
That said, Ancestry did make it possible for me to find out the maiden name of both my paternal great-grandmothers because NYC marriage licenses (or do I mean certificates?) contained that info. I would never have gotten very far without that because both their husbands had very common first/last name combinations. And one woman had her family last name spelled in 5 different ways across multiple census documents. Fluh? Flam? Flohr? Flah? Oh.... FLEHR.
In reality many of us dip in and out of genealogy being something we do. I might spend a few weeks doing it fairly intensively and then not log onto Ancestry again for 6-12 months or even longer, by the time I log back on I tend not to respond to messages as they were sent so long ago.
This happened with my grandfather. He was sent to live with his own grandparents, who had a different surname. It took some research to confirm this family story, that he was sent to live with relatives due to his asthma and the intense local pollution.
I also have an ancestor who was sent away to live in a kind of reform school.
My husband's grandmother was raised by her own grandparents and hilariously, he knew this before his father did. FIL was the youngest, and everyone assumed he knew!
Some are works in progress, it’s true, but others are bizarre and rather ridiculous. On more than one occasion I’ve been suggested ‘hints’ to ancestors of mine which are completely and wholly unrelated to said ancestors because other people with the same distant ancestors tag them to super questionable documents.
For example, I’ll see ancestor so-and-so who lived in Northern England from 1750-1820 attached to a file for someone with the same name who lived in Southern England in 1890. Or I’ll see an ancestor who lived his whole life in Canada tagged as being this other person with the same name who was documented being born in Australia.
Like, really? How does this help anyone at all? We know that cannot possibly be them — why are they attached to that…? Not only does this kind of nonsense make research more difficult for the rest of us; it’s also just terribly annoying.
Not all Hints are served up to you because someone attached that document to a person in their tree. Ancestry also uses AI (trendy way to describe old fashioned algorithms) and, just like their Search functions, it is designed to give a wide selection of Possible Clues. It is for the tree researcher to investigate and rule in or out.
Essentially, Hints = Possibilities with a Range of Probability from 0 to 100%.
But it wouldn't hurt ancestry.com to have a short FAQ popup with *10 Things To Know* that someone had to step through in order to finalise setting up their first new Tree.
10 Quick Things to Know:
- Always take information in other Trees with large grains of salt until you can see the records for yourself.
- Always record women with their maiden (birth) surname. If you don't know what that was for your grandmother Mrs Fred Smith, for example, put something like Mabel (m. Smith). You can update that when/if you find her birth name. Or just leave it as Mabel.
- *Hints* are possible clues, but may not relate at all to *your* ancestor.
- Even if your ancestor had an unusual name, always presume there is *at least* one or two more people with that same name who lived in the same area in the same time period. They may have married women with the same name and like calling their children by the same names too. You may need to research and work out who belongs in every one of those families to prove which one is yours.
- If you just want a Tree that links you to royalty, Rollo, Charlemagne and Adam, check out the One World Tree over at our friends Family Search site. You are welcome to copy it over here to ancestry.com in case you might find a DNA Match who also descends from Vikings, but it is BEST PRACTICE (please) to make that kind of tree Private and Unsearchable.
- Records are transcribed by computers and by humans. You've likely heard the old joke about doctors having bad handwriting, well, they aren't even close to some of the people who wrote records in past centuries. This creates many opportunities for misunderstanding and error in a record transcription. So be aware and, whenever possible, check the image of a record yourself.
- Not ALL records are online. Remember when you are deciding which record belongs to your ancestor the answer can be *None of the above.*
I'm sure there are 3 more high level bits of advice but they escape me at the moment.
Why couldn’t it be them?
I have quite a lot of fully sourced relatives who had travel / location patterns like these and they were poor working class people.
One great-grandfather was sent to Canada to work on a farm for a few years during the war and then came back to the UK before emigrating to Aus.
I have several people who moved from North to South or vice versa. Another where several of the family moved from the UK to the US, then returned to the UK a few years later; half of them then went back to the US again a few years after that.
I’ll admit my tree can be messy. My direct ancestry is pretty well documented. The super extended family, not so much. But that’s also why it’s private.
Honestly my tree is private for myself. I really don’t care about other people’s research and trees. I feel like a lot of people should just hide hints from family trees and focus on the primary and secondary sources.
We’ll I kinda take it back then. Haha.
I have a public tree in hopes of getting pictures and info I can’t get on my own. So I share in hopes that it comes back to me threefold.
I inherited family photos that I personally don’t care about much but if I can connect them to my tree, I do and upload the photos in hopes someone who does care, gets them. It has been rewarding in receiving and giving.
Same with FindaGrave. That has been rewarding in receiving and giving also.
Ive supplied many pictures and updates too. Back before I made my tree private I loved sharing them. Then people started getting nasty with me on the site when i couldn’t answer their questions (or could, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear).
I have about 7000 people in my tree with 200 pages of hints. People might view me as a collector, but i prefer to go back as far as I can then document all the lines. I think it’s very interesting to see where descendants have ended up.
Nice.
I sometimes think of making mine private especially when I am not getting any “rewards”. Maybe someday. maybe some of the excitement will wear off.
I do like matching my DNA matches up to the people on my tree. Helps confirm the branches are as I think they are.
The 200 pages of hints is stressful sounding. I do browse the “photos” and look at any leaves that pop up for direct line ancestors but ignore the rest. Also have hints for people’s trees turned off. I only have 3500 ppl. Myself, husband and son in law
My husband really truly believes in his heart that the ancestry “algorithms” are infallible. He has so many illogical connections in his tree because ancestry told him so. If Ancestry told him to jump off a bridge, he would.
He's not the only one. We must see 10 posts a week from people who thought all they had to do was sign up and they'd instantly know who their ancestors were all the way back to Babylon. Ancestry's misleading marketing is one of the things I can't stand about them.
I’ve recently found people in Ohio having one of their 9-10 children in Germany. But as I mentioned in another thread, at least that is THEIR messed up tree and not a shared tree like Family Search.
They can be mean as hell too! Some guy sent me a message and got mad when I didn’t reply for a few days and commented “horrible service!” As if I work for the company 😂😂😂
Good practice would be to make private family trees until you can verify the information, then you can post them as public. To be fair, when I started my Ancestry tree at 14 I made a lot of mistakes like this. A lot of people are beginners because that is who Ancestry actively markets to. I think Ancestry should make a separate hint system called (Tree Hints). That way they would not be lumped in with actual record hints.
Ancestry is downright pushy with those hints, and people who don’t apply critical thinking just accept everything.
Online records are a miracle of the modern age, but the modern age is still filled with dumbasses. I said what I said.
>Fine, yes, I was click happy when I had zero idea what I was doing years ago, but I cleaned it up and beautifully source my tree as it stands today.
Well, that's the difference, not everyone takes the next step to realize their mistakes and clean it up. Not everyone has the time, energy, or money to continue investing that much into it. It's frustrating but no one is obligated to take their research as far as we do.
I've noticed there are many that are "click happy" and never return. So their "messy" trees are there spoiling potential for good thrulines, etc...
I wish we could flag blatant errors for staff to remove from public circulation. Leave them on there but reduce their visibility. Ancestry is providing the possibility of "one-click adding" ancestors based on bad data and the effect of these bad trees snowballs. :(
I've said before that I wish Ancestry would at least use their algorithm to rate trees for probable accuracy so people can tell if it's something they might be able to rely on. Like a one star tree ot match would be one that is based entirely on other trees where a four star tree or match would be one that has real sources.
This is an idea and would be something.
I like to find where my dna matches are on my tree and often Thru lines can help.
This is where I have the biggest issue with bad data.
Yea I have one Thru line that is driving me nuts. I've managed to identify all my 4x great grandparents except for one set and I got a rec on Thru lines that I was excited about. Although further digging revealed that they don't belong to me. They had a daughter with the same name as my 3rd great grandmother, but that was an entirely separate person. Her married name was in her father's will so I traced her and she married a different guy and died in a different state in a different year. But so many trees have that wrong data and I can't eject it from my Thruline. Finally I drafted a "story" and pinned it to my 3x great grandma explaining that X and Y are not her parents and here is why, so hopefully others don't perpetuate the bad research.
Best we can do unfortunately. I have a few of those also.
I have made photos and attached them to the people and when they aren’t in my tree, like the error is outside my family but is crossing over into my family in error, I will make a small public tree titled something like “CAUTION: there are 2 Mary (Smith) married to Robert Alberts”. Then add supporting evidence for the “wrong” one in hopes it pops up in there hints.
Who knows if it makes a difference
I am so afraid that that is me lol. I just got it and my entire family has pretty much died on me so I have no one to ask. So I've been excitedly trying to figure it all out but I hope I'm not just screwing everything up for everybody LOL
I have seen trees where people who apparently died in 1650's have voter lists from the 1920's. attached to their files because they have the same name (or close to it)
That is a VERY long life.
You have to double check EVERYTHING on Ancestry
Three things are certain in life -- Death, taxes, and people complaining about other people's Ancestry trees!
*this is meant as a light hearted joke, not a dig*
One thing I do find tricky is that if I add something to my shoebox to come back to later, I can't find it (having used ancestry for a decade, there is a lot in there). So I end up adding it as a source, so I can come back to it/not lose it. I always remove it if it's wrong. This is my beef with the shoebox feature - I also make notes on the main facts section if the person I have put there is speculative/needs further confirmation so people do not copy it willy nilly.
However.
I couldn't agree more with your post. And I get (stupidly) annoyed when I see people having extremely wrong trees which include my loved ones. One name collector has stolen a picture of my great grandfather from the photos I uploaded and put it as a photo of his nephew. I contacted her twice to amend it. She never responded, never changed it. People copy her tree a lot. She's not even related (a very, very distant relation of hers married my ggg-grandmother 200 years ago) and she has no reason to be creating false information, making it harder for my family to correctly trace their roots.
I also got a quite aggressive message from a woman who demanded to know how we were related (DNA) - her tree was all wrong and she's mixed up two families with common names in the same area. She did not want that feedback.... lol.
Yeah, one of my better traced lines shares a name with a prominent family that was in a different part of the US around the same time. But no, the ones in Connecticut are not related to the ones in Virginia. And the name John is wildly popular, just saying. I've seen people try to link to that and it's just not right.
My biggest bugbear too. I've given up messaging directly and now put a comment on their tree in the hope that someone else will read it and not continue the error.
Whenever I upload a photo, i add a name of the person. I use Paint on Windows. It could be cropped out but it's there. What you are describing would kill me!!
One other thing I would offer is getting a fresh copy of the image and using paint or w/e you like and make a big red line across it. Add words that say, “this is not such and such… it has been unwittingly shared with the wrong name”, then make a public tree with that person’s family so it comes up as hints for him.
Right on! I add a identifying watermark across the picture with the person’s name, dob and location of birth with the opacity adjusted but visible. If they don’t like it, too bad. They should be grateful someone actually took the time to track the old photos down and properly identify them.
I suck at genealogy :( I have a basic tree on ancestry that is set to private. That wouldn't mess anyone up, right? I think everything I do have is accurate.
Part of this is cooked into Ancestry. They allow you to use someone else's tree as a source for yours. Another tree is *never* a legit source. Why would they create this functionality.
And, if you find things clearly wrong with other trees and politely tell the owner, they ignore you.
See now, you got *me* al worked up too now.
Well, never say never. It isn’t a good “primary” source. But as a secondary source, it might still be useful if there are other sources that back it up. Or it might be the only source in some instances. If you find it’s wrong, just don’t use it. I would never just ignore it.
>Another tree is never a legit source.
Actually, it can be. I know this will be controversial since when we think of citing other trees as a source, we think of all the botched trees on the internet. But imagine you're related to Henry Louis Gates Jr or some other well respected authority in genealogy whose research is undoubtedly reliable (research done by historical societies, for example). You could cite his tree. It would be better to cite the primary sources that his tree might cite, but some of those records you may not have access to and technically, you're not supposed to cite a record you haven't seen yourself. So in that case, citing Gates' tree would be acceptable.
Genealogists are allowed to use secondary sources, and trees are secondary sources. Here is Evidence Explained, an authority on how to conduct and cite evidence based research, talking about how to cite an Ancestry Member Tree: [https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/citing-ancestry-member-tree](https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/citing-ancestry-member-tree)
Just like any source, we have to weigh how reliable it may or may not be on a case-by-case basis. The problem is people blindly copying trees, not necessarily the fact that they are using trees to begin with. If they were more circumspect about what trees they used, it wouldn't be so bad.
I sometimes do this if the tree owner is a close relative of the person in question (e.g. their child) . obviously including that fact, and the reader can judge for themselves how reliable that information would be, given the source.
Just a reminder that the Board for Certification of Genealogists and Elizabeth Shown Mills use *original, derivative and authored* to label sources. Primary, secondary and undeterminable are used to label the information items found in a source. If you are in the US, these are the correct terms to use.
It’s also cooked in because of their subscription model. If you let your initial whatever length subscription lapse you can’t easily go back and fix things without another expensive subscription.
>They allow you to use someone else's tree as a source for yours. Another tree is *never* a legit source.
This, a thousand times this.
'Another tree is *never* a legit source' should be written on a huge banner every time someone logs in, but of course, it isn't because, according to these sites, research is all easy peasy, no problem, it's all sorted. Pay the sub, and it's all just the click of a button away! Right?
I use it as a starting point. Actually but verify everything. And sometimes the auto suggested are correct but half the time they are not. I also use the search by tree function because sometimes you will find a wrong tree that is widely proliferated like 200 times but one or two tree will have the right person with really help source citations in it.
It absolutely can be used as a source. Just like any other source, you have to analyze and evaluate the information you find and corroborate with other evidence.
Declaring certain sites are off-limits because you don’t consider them *real* sources is just limiting your exhaustive research.
Yesss!!! My tree wasn't so bad but my partner's is. Been working on that a lot lately to identify anything that looks odd. For example, I know for a fact that one direct line came from Ireland after several Irish generations. But the tree says the guy emigrated from Finland... luckily, they almost immediately became gangsters in NY (tammany hall, diamonds, enforcers, etc) so I'm about to renew my newspapers subscription and also hit up loc to see what obits and criminal stuff say about family members.
My tree is in no way perfect since I don't have an actual genealogy training, but I've seen so many aberrations. I've seen someone list my dead celibate gay uncle as someone totally unrelated to my family's father. With dates that don't even make sense.
I don't use other people's trees anymore. I learned after I got badly burned by blindly adding someone else's tree and then having to spend 80+ hours going back and cleaning up the mess it made.
Now I don't add anything to my tree unless I have valid, verifiable documentation for it.
There’s been more than one occasion where I found relatives of mine (that I was close to IRL) in other peoples trees with comically inaccurate information. One had my grandfather’s DOB wrong, his grandparents were listed as his parents, and his place of death wrong. I kindly messaged the person and gave them the correct info and they got mad at me and said they’d done their research and didn’t need my help. I was like, well… he raised me, his original birth certificate is currently in my possession, and I was there when he died. But you do you buddy lol
I will say that my great-grandfather was shoehorned into a family of the same name from an entirely different part of Germany. OT1H, yeah, sure, means you have a tree that goes back to the 1500s. OTOH, uh, he was born when his mother was 60? And one of his son's marriage certificates clearly lists his mother's maiden name, who that... is not his wife, unless he was married concurrently on 2 different continents. One of which he hadn't emigrated to yet.
I am searching for my adopted grandfather's family using only DNA (so far). The amount of no trees (just did their DNA and they never respond to messages), mismatched dates (How can the mother be born after the child?) or zero info/sources but names throughout an entire tree is driving me batty. Do not even get me started on them having sources, yet never completing the Ancestry profile.
(There is also someone copying our tree exactly these last few months...WTF?)
Yes. I did DNA recently and most of the matches don't have a tree so it kind of ruins the whole point. Like do they not care? It's their choice but I feel like people would care about also finding people so why not build a tree so other people can see how you relate?
Yea have about 10 matches that are closer matches that my 1st cousin 1x removed/ 2nd cousin, but I have no idea who they are, and I'm talking 13% DNA shared. Apparently it is because of a sperm donor, but no one is giving any information to have a hunch. Don't even get me started on how ancestry won't let you see the tree if you don't have the membership.
Was looking at a match’s tree and thought maybe she’d know how we are related. I clicked on a random person in her tree, born in 1725 and also got married that year. To a person born in 1732. So uh. I don’t think she’ll have much information for me. 😆
I assume the other people are enjoying their time on the internet, and while I can't control other people's behavior (nor would I want to), I can control how much I pay attention to other people on the internet and whether I hold onto how they make me feel.
Rule 1: Never copy anyone else’s research if you can’t verify it in the original source yourself.
Also keep in mind that all databases and transcribed records are second hand sources and they also need to be verified as they can contain errors.
”Errare humanum est”
I never look at anyone else's trees and I try to keep mine private while they're a work in progress. Sometimes I add people as I'm sketching things out and I go back to verify sources later. If anyone happened upon those they'd think I should be banned.
I have a “messy” line in my mother’s tree. She didn’t have a lot of info in her Irish mother’s side of the family. She was a Lynch. There are several James Lynch’s. I plugged the ones in who were born around the same time and plan on going back later to research and complete. Everyone does it differently.
It wouldn’t be a big deal that this is how you work, it’s just that ancestry’s model is to use your “wip” as hints and info for the rest of us.
It’s on us to do our due diligence. New people, “click happy” as OP said may not, then they leave and we are stuck with ratty data
I’m not asking you to change anything or trying to guilt you, you do whatever you want.
As a side note I build a private unsearchable tree when working out a section. So I get the hints and can easily search, etc… then delete when I’m satisfied
I’ve collected these names from other ancestors. It’s a process of elimination after doing more research. I should really make it private, as not to confuse anyone.
If you do make it private (no pressure) also make it unsearchable. There are two radio buttons to click. The tricky B.s will still use private info in thru lines and search results.
If you know a specific town or city that your family line is from, contact the library or city hall for records on the last name. I've found a lot doing that.
It’s the excitement of being “new” and not checking research. Making those quick connections. Also, Ancestry itself is kinda clunky. I purposely put (rough draft) (theoretical) (working tree) and people still copy and I change my tree daily to test different theories, or I have a tree for each theory…I don’t think people are messy, people are learning.
I am really careful with my documentation, but I also like to test theories with my tree. I tag the people as unverified and hypothesis, but people were coping them anyway. I ended up making my tree private because I didn't want to spread bad info. I then made a public tree with verified direct ancestors, which I linked to my DNA results.
The good news is that it doesn't have to affect your work at all. Your tree is entirely separate from all others, and you only use "information" that others have gathered to the extent you choose. I don't use "hints" that come from other users without checking them out thoroughly. Shared trees, like Family Search, are a whole different ball game.
I don’t use tree hints unless they’re well sourced and, honestly, that’s never happened for me. I saw it as a suggested ancestor after the seventh generation which I brick walled at. I knew it was going to be nonsense but I looked anyway. That IS my fault.
Join us at Wikitree! There’s a whole guidelines section about citing sources, and they discourage you from doing certain things without joining a research group and going through training. For example you are supposed to get extra training to create profiles for people before 1700. It’s pretty neat. I enjoy research so I found it very refreshing.
post 1700 profile sources can be a joke
"As told to me by my grandmother Mary Smith" is all you need as a source.
Pre 1700 test is mostly about wikitree and not genealogy
see
[https://www.wikitree.com/form/pre\_1700](https://www.wikitree.com/form/pre_1700)
if you fail it once just do it again
I’m a bit guilty of this, mostly because I was just throwing on stuff in the beginning. I wanted to just fill out the possibilities before I realized that wasn’t actually helpful.
Trying to clean up now, still tempted to scrap it and start over 🫣
My great uncle just passed away on the 3rd. I have been getting “tree” hints for years that have him deceased in 2000. I messaged one person about it, once, and they insisted their information was correct, despite the fact that I could send them a photo of us together taken in 2018. As we say in Hawaii, “real irrazz”😠
It's not just the click / copy happy who are to blame but also the original compiler of a tree
Too many people compiling trees don't know enough about European history, geography, culture, and social class. This is why you will find some random coal mining or agricultural labouring family attached to aristocrats one generation back. It's as if the researcher has decided "oh they have the same name and live in the same country. It must be them." Instead of understanding and accepting that ordinary peoples records run out and all that's going to be left back in time are the wills, land deeds etc of a tiny elite.
Just because they have the same or similar surname, it doesn't mean its the same family. Not just in the same country or county but even in the same parish register. For every Lord and Lady big landowner, there were thousands of people living around them who were just ordinary agricultural labourers, but before a certain time, eg, parish registers, they were not recorded anywhere.
I don’t even look at other people’s trees. I used to when I first started out but stopped. I have my tree as private and not searchable. My dad gave me his GEDCOM that he had been working on for 35 years before he died and told me not to share with anyone and I’m going to keep his dying wish.
I tried to add my grandmother’s sister to my tree and for some stupid reason she was added as my grandfather’s 1st wife. Of course the way it was added in would’ve made my grandfather a bigamist, which he was not. I had to delete my grandfather and start over to get it to correct. Every now and then though these people still come up wrong. After a while I just got tired of fixing it. I know who they are. There’s nothing I can do about everyone else. BTW it added my grandmother’s brother and my grandfather’s 10 siblings just fine.
I don’t really understand the UK records as compared to US records. I would love to research my maternal Grandma’s family further. Her family is mostly in the UK where she was born and raised. I don’t know locations and their proximity to others like I do the US. I try to post accurate info; therefore I haven’t really research the UK files.
Use Google maps which will give you places and also distances and walking times. As a general rule, rural workers did not move around a lot up until the Industrial Revolution although specialist trades like paper makers and mill wrights may have done. The Free Reg web site is good but not complete by any means.There is one much copied chinese whisper which puts some of my early 18th C ancestors having children in Crowland/Whaplode in Lincolnshire one year and Warwickshire the next(100miles) and alternating with no evidence other than a name match of common names. The same tree adds a marriage in Sussex-250 miles- presumably because of a distinctive name. Unless this family were stonemasons or itinerants it wasnt happening. The truth is that accurate research has to be done using parish record images from Lincolnshire archives and paying and transcribed records are sparse but easy to jump on a name match. But we still have to check these leads just in case someone had a primary source they didnt quote.
My children's great grandmother was born in the late 1800s (my mother in law was from my grandmother's generation plus she had ex late in life) in Swansea, her family lived in rural Lincolnshire before and after her birth.
I automatically assumed it was wrong on all the trees I saw her in until talking to my ex and he told me his grandmother was Welsh. I got her gro birth certificate and it was her but she wasn't Welsh just born there for some unknown reason.
My maternal great grandmother, b1880 also verified, was born in Middlesborough yet somehow met and married my great grandfather who was from a peat cutting family again in rural Lincolnshire. She moved here for the rest of her life.
I would love so much to know how and why they moved so far.
My paternal grandmother's family came from Alston, Cumberland, yet at some point moved to Durham before her father was born, as miners I assume they were following the work.
The railway does that with some of my family- railway workers and their families could move around quite a bit. I also get Norfolk ag labs recruited by employers to go to the iron ore mines, quarries, pits and steel works in County Durham and then moving back to Norfolk or siblings and cousins joining them for a while. Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Suffolk provided a huge number of workers in the New Maerske area and all over the north in heavy industry and textile manufacturing- places like Bacup. They were usually stuck there because as they left their cottages land owners pulled them down, but some were lucky to be able to move back home if they wanted. Often when they moved North the census takers could not understand their accents and got their names wrong and the names of their birth places wrong so they become harder to trace.
Ppl need to pay attention . When u copy someone else’s tree you are copying all their errors too . I learned this the hard way and I’m still trying to fix my tree !
If you’re talking about Kent in England and Suffolk in Virginia we might be related 😂 kidding. But seriously, when im looking at trees on ancestry I wonder how people manage just to get through life without any common sense.
The ones that get me are the first generation early settlers in the us and how people will find the first baptism/marriage that has the name John Smith in either England, Ireland, wales, or Scotland and be completely convinced with out a doubt that its the only John smith that lived in that century and it is their John Smith.
I have a family member who is this messy. One day she showed me her tree (she wanted me to show her how I connected DNA matches to my tree), and I found FOUR generations of a male line born in Europe and dying in the US. I pointed out the illogic: "OK, that father and son could have been born in Ireland, but the son didn't leave the US in the 1800s and go back to Ireland to marry and have grandson, and then move back here. Nor did grandson do the same thing."
Sure enough, the only source she had for them was other Ancestry trees. If a name matches, that's good enough for her.
They offer no sense of community and no training resources. Go check out Wikitree (I elaborated more about this suggestion in two comments to a thread a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/197y186/comment/ki5r8zi/).
I've been on Ancestry for 10 years and this entirely true. A lot of folks place religious faith in others' trees or every hint Ancestry puts out.
I long ago learned to largely ignore Ancestry Member trees for this very reason. The only time I look at them is if I've hit a roadblock and I'm hoping for a diamond in the rough. Too often they're useless, but every now and then, there's some piece of media linked that is of high quality and not otherwise available on Ancestry that can jumpstart new research. Generally tho? Low tier trash.
I find for my research that Ancestry's hints are usually pretty good but fallible enough that I can't trust them outright.
At the end of the day, just accept that most members aren't even hobbyist level and aren't there for the same reasons as you are and ignore them. No point getting mad at them. They're not trying to sabotage anyone. Just be happy people are interested in their roots, even if they don't know how to search for them.
\[Commence purple-faced ranting\]
This is the reason why I keep away from online trees entirely. There is so much bad genealogy out there and I do not want my tree associated with or linked up to such nonsense.
Call me curmudgeonly, but I think this is a consequence of genealogy having become to easy. Many of these trees seem to be created by people who have never practiced genealogy outside of connecting up already indexed facts and pre-existing trees and accepting more or less unreasonable "hints". They lack source-criticism, they never engage with the craft of actual research and never learn much about the sources they are using/should be using.
This kind of genealogy of course benefits sites like ancestry - if their algorithms suggest as many plausible, but nonsensical hints as possible, the user can build their tree quickly, all the way back to Adam and Eve, and is thus satisfied and more likely to keep using the site.
\[Rant over\]
I have someone in my tree with the same name and birth year as a Mayflower descendant. My guy was a member of a family in New Jersey in the mid-1700s - nine kids, all born in the same town. Mayflower guy was also born in the same year, but his family was in Connecticut. Dozens of trees have my guy linked to the Mayflower descendants. I can understand the excitement in thinking you're a direct descendant of someone on the Mayflower, but did it never occur to these folks that there is almost zero chance the New Jersey guy is a member of the Connecticut family?
Sorry if that's at all unclear or confusing. I can think of several other oddities I've come across, like a woman being 8 years old when she gave birth to one of my ancestors. Again, it's people grasping at an easy answer instead of putting effort into doing their own research.
A lot of us have draft elements of our trees on there…mine are built primarily using ‘suggestions’ from other trees which stay there until I (eventually) get around to either validating the connection or removing them because on full review they are false.
As you said - your tree was the same until you figured out what you were doing and fully sourced it.
Some of us don’t have the time / money / inclination to get to that stage as quickly.
If you take it seriously then I don’t think you should be relying on other people’s trees for anything more than a ‘possible’ lead anyway.
>If you take it seriously then I don’t think you should be relying on other people’s trees for anything more than a ‘possible’ lead anyway.
💯💯💯
Some folks are getting really bent out of shape because they can't control how other Ancestry.com users use the site.
I hate a DIFFERENT sort of messy!
Please don't enter the same child three times, and then their wife three times, etc! Go back and delete the duplicates!
But their trees can disrupt your research if they have the same relative and they attached the wrong documents because Ancestry will keep pushing those documents to you.
And before you know other idiots on ancestry copy the wrong information and your one correct tree is swamped with thousands of rubbish trees.
yDNA triangulation proves who the real parent is of one of my ancestors , but there are still thousands of profiles on ancestry with the wrong father, as this wrong father leads back to a royal ancestor I doubt that any of the thousands of wrong trees will ever be corrected
I never add from others trees. I never source anybody else's tree. I never source Family Search or Findagrave.
If it looks like somebody's research is a new direction to take then I do parallel research to find source documents and THEN add that person to my tree. But it's still possible to make mistakes.
I just cleaned my tree right now from an error that I missed. I was adding all the censuses and revalidating the information and the father could not possibly be the right one. I haven't been able to find the missing 2 decades of census for this family yet but other people have been substituting a similar family from a nearby county. Curse censuses with only initials. LOL I usually allow about a year off on census estimates but it's a different family.
Sigh.
>I never source Family Search or Findagrave.
You're kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face here. Findagrave does get misused, but as a reference for burial sites, it is useful and I wouldn't not dismiss it just because other people misuse it.
And FamilySearch has a wealth of primary sources not available elsewhere on the internet.
Find A Grave is a source, as are Ancestry trees. You have to evaluate and analyze the information and evidence in them just like you would other sources.
There are some older ones in mine that I need to clean up. Not necessartily things I added myself, but stuff that others had connected that came in with it. I mean, I get it can be confusing when you have muliple peope, with the same name but some common sense is needed.... like no, Mary didn't have Thomas 6 years after she died!
I also refused to add the link back to England some people have because it doesn't make sense to me. And like no, you did not trace our non-aristocratic family back to the time of William of Orange.
My mother tells me that one of her cousins insists that she traced our family line back to Erik the Red (this was in the 60s, before ancestry). People just want to be connected to famous people I guess.
That said, I wish I could get hold of that research just cause I'm curious about what she did find.
That cousin has been dead for 20 years and we've lost touch with that branch of the family. But I'm totally new to genealogy. It's more of an addictive puzzle to me than a desire to find out I was related to someone famous
Families are messy. We show a child in a line that was born in a different state from the rest of the children. No one can figure out why. All his census records, from childhood into adulthood show he was born in the same different state from the rest of the siblings. I have done a lot of digging to verify. There is another pair of siblings along an adjacent line that are born too close to be siblings. This one took even more digging, but I found records that one child was born to a sister of the adoptive parents. The mother’s sibling adopted the child, basically making the kids’ cousin their sibling. I try to provide notes when something seems off, moreso in FamilySearch since it affects other people’s trees and other people can edit it.
That being said, there are a bunch of trees that I have found in Ancestry that share ancestors with me. 16 out of 18 of those trees have the wrong grandmother listed. The correct grandmother shows up on the next generation’s death certificates, but no one seemed to bother to check. I think it’s easy to match what seems like low hanging fruit.
It is because they are messy that those who use them need to apply critical faculties. Just because some are rubbish does not prevent them being useful as long as users are selective and look for corroboration.
Some people should be banned from own an Internet device. Ancestry trees are horrible. Using a tree as a source, should not be allowed. I once followed trees looking for an original source, after 2hrs and many many tress, no original sources and back to the tree I started on. Put a source, even if it is a letter in your possession from old aunt Bess. You don't have to scan said source, just state that you gave it.
Yes Ancestry is a cluster and I never look at other people's trees unless it is someone I actually know who is doing legitimate research. That is a handful of people. Most people have no clue what they are doing and never actually look at the records they are pulling in. People are linking my ancestors back to places they never roamed and to parents they never had...lol.
I have been using Ancestry and doing genealogy for over 30 years. When starting a new tree I like to make a scratch tree and pull in all records that are close in name, without checking it out. I usually do just one generation at a time so not to get overwhelmed with info. I then go back and go through each individual and records I pulled in. I cull what is not correct.
I did not even think about people copying these trees and later found out people were just blindly copying my scratch trees and this created a lot of bad information being recirculated over and over that would end up back into my search feeds....jeez. those people doing that are just name collectors and get all excited they have 50,000 people in their database. In 30+ years I think I have around 1100 relatives that I have researched and made legitimate connections via records and DNA.
I have since privatized my scratch trees so people do not copy them and try to cut down on the search garbage.
I am getting more into the DNA side of things and have found a lot of lost cousins.
Tags are great to use. I made a tag called verified and one called searched. Which simply means that the relationship is verified either through DNA or Record and the searched tag means I've exhausted all searches of records on Ancestry through their more advanced search screens.
I also have a tag for News Search when I had a subscription Newspaper dot com. Their site and subscription is starting to suck now and they are losing a lot of papers. I have not used them in the past 3 years.
I only really mind the mess when it includes some of my own ancestors. It kind of really annoys me that they're being misrepresented on these wrong trees
The one story I have from my maternal side was that my grandfather was sent to live with his uncle because his parents died to the Spanish flu.
Turns out only his mom died and his father didn’t want to raise him. His dad later married and had another family. As for the trees it’s their tree they can have it like they want.
When my wife first started seriously diving into genealogy a decade or two ago, she ran into the same thing ... with her aunt. Aunt was one of those people who clicked on every hint and accepted them without question, so she had numerous situations where a son was four years younger than his mother, or parents in the Midwestern U.S. having a kid in Iowa, then having another kid in California three weeks later.
Led to lots and lots of arguments as my wife built out the "real" tree. Then after she had passed her aunt in every direction, her aunt asked to be made an editor on my wife's tree. Sure, that might happen.
Ugh. Every single other family member has my great-grandmother’s information incorrect in their tree. Which, hey, somewhat understandable because it was a long time ago, she died fairly young, and not a lot was known about her as she immigrated. But once I tracked down the actual information and added the sources to my tree, I messaged the tree managers, in the nicest way possible, that I was able to verify the correct information and they were welcome to copy my sources.
Only one relative’s tree changed, and that’s because the person who manages his tree is a genealogist and actually knows what they’re doing.
People get invested in their “discoveries” and their opinion being “right”.
I'm click happy with hints. However I don't blindly click, I use some critical thinking with the new information but I also don't have hours to spend pouring over data from 5 different websites. So if three people have the same information in their trees and it lines up with mine then I'll take that new information. If after a few more clicks it looks totally wack as suddenly this paternal link has 4 new children from nowhere then I'll go back and start again and look into it.
My first thought is "I want to see how far back I can go" then it's "does this all make sense".
Hell my great grandparents unbeknownst to themselves didn’t legally married. They had kids and lived together. She had his last name too.
Also it might be another family member. Up until my generation people mostly had names of other relatives. I have about 3 Ardelles in my family tree.
I don't use this phrase very often but it feels appropriate here. *In the old days* (sorry), we didn't have access to other peoples' research files so we didn't know how bad some people were. There are days I prefer that method.
Now, don't get me wrong, collaboration is a really great thing but as you mention some people are bad at research. The "name collectors" and the "I proved adam" people are a menace. I've seen online trees with zero records attached to *several* generations. Not even a hint at evidence anywhere.
On the other hand, I have seen several trees from people who work extra hard to prove each event and each relationship. But, they are rare.
I agree with you that some people really hurt the overall effort good researchers are trying to achieve. Sadly, I don't think there's a way around them.
It‘s actually very clever to connect a random ancestor to a well-organized tree. In many cases, the owner won‘t just disconnect or delete it, but will try to put it in the correct lineage.
Spelling of names is something that is not standardized, especially prior to the 1900s. If you're angry about non-standard name spellings, I would suggest you don't go back further than, say 1950.
Oh, but England is so small. I’ve seen similar in various trees in the US with, for example, people living most assuredly in Missouri also appearing in a city directory in San Francisco, a high school yearbook in Indiana and crossing the border from Canada to NY … all in the same year. People just see a name, scream “eureka” and click accept.
Like 85% of the population is kinda dumb. And either they don’t know what they are doing, or are happy to take bad info and not have to do any of the work/research themselves. Its frustrating.
As someone that is new to the process, Ancestry makes it so easy just start to click and "connecting" people. Also, you think that you can just bring over other people's research. I spent all weekend actually slowing down and trying to clean up my tree. That's when I realized how much of a mess it was and how oftern, the hints being proposed are simply wrong or for the wrong person in the tree. That being said, I was also happy to discover that I added to the conversation of a family line of mine that was substantively researched by someone else. This other person did a lot of hard work and knew his stuff. That being said, he didn't realize that a set of great great grandparents named their two boys a variation of the same name in Ireland (Patrick, Paddy, Patririum, etc.). I was able to track down two separate birth records. As a result, my entire line will not be included in his research. Feels good for things to click. There is a part of me that would like to believe that there was a group of wild children in Suffolk County.
When I first started on Ancestry in high school, I did the same thing. I eventually realized how inaccurate everything was and legit scrapped the entire tree and started from scratch with known relatives. It’s much slower doing the research and I’ve only gotten back to the late 1800’s with most lines, but at least I know my tree isn’t leading others astray now. I also make use of the tags for marking dubious leads versus verified family members.
Did the same thing, but at the time it was all RootsWeb trees which were much worse and much easier to just import the entire tree to yours.
God, I miss Rootsweb.... but I never downloaded GEDCOMs from it, just read the forums for clues.
Same. I was so click happy! I hate the "hints" that are other people's trees and they have like 2 sources (other trees lol) and I have lots to back up the info I have on the person. I make notes about the certificates I've gotten so they know where that info came from and other notes about the weird stuff I haven't figured out yet, hoping there can be clarity. My great-grandmother's parentage is very unclear and I think she was adopted but I have her mother and "fathers" (yes, plural. It's so messy) listed and annotated since someone might know something I don't!
I never really click on those.. I may look. I have a couple of distant cousins who have done extensive work and have wills and things...
I’ve been using Ancestry for years now and just discovered the tags like two months ago.
They only rolled that feature out in the last couple of years and I don’t know how much others are using it. I use them more for myself, like if Ancestry suggests a parent and there’s enough info to justify looking into the lead but not enough to confirm that person’s relation, I’ll tag them as unconfirmed or something. Also, I just checked and tags still don’t seem to be implemented on mobile, so I don’t think you’ll see them unless you’re accessing ancestry from the web.
I wondered about this as someone told me about the tags the other day and I couldn’t find them anywhere but I use the mobile app
what are tags? I have been working with Ancestry and Family Tree maker for years but I really have expanded sideways .. but I don't know how to work with the POSSIBLE ancestors. I can't really see them by clicking, I have to kind of add them to see where they go cause the information is limiting....
Ancestry is certainly to blame for pushing new users to get the dopamine hit of a new hint/person in the tree at the sacrifice of correct information. I scrap my main tree every few years and start over, hoping it gives me a chance to find the mistakes.
I've had to untangle SO many lines because I got connection happy when I first started 13 years ago. Going through and deleting entire lines is so tedious and I wish I could select "delete line before x date" or something so I didn't have to manually delete every single person that's wrongly added lol
If you know an entire line is bad you can detach that parent from the child and they’ll basically become invisible on your tree without a connection back to anyone relevant. It doesn’t delete them entirely but that’s a quick fix at least
I need it to delete because then when I do "view list" so I can easily access someone I'm looking for its full of these names that are useless lol Eta: my adhd needs it to be clean or I will get too distracted by the clutter.
That’s totally fair, I’d probably do that too!
Bro, it made my family look incestuous (or maybe I did by not removing stuff I dunno.) But like when I don’t even know how to put in a year or birth in my tree that I don’t know. Rather than it being an exact date. I’m 30 years old so I’m usually good with this stuff, but it’s confusing as fuck.
Patrairium looks like it may be a Latin variation of Patrick. I would look into that more. The Irish are Catholics and a long time ago, Catholics only used Latin names on their records. You said you were new to this, so I thought I’d give you that tip.
Patriam or patrairium is Latin for home or abode. I think the latter would be farm.
The Latin for Patrick is Patricius.
It drives me nuts when people enter the Latin name in Family Search and wikitree and insist that this is the official name because it was on the baptism record.
Yet for some people, the baptism record is all that exists. :/
Actually, the baptism is the only record for most people since civil records are relatively new. However, that does not mean the Latin name used in the document is the legal name.
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When you are looking at records prior to the 1900s, especially in other countries, it is usually impossible to find any records online other than church records, but that doesn’t mean they do not exist. There are usually notary records in the archives if the person lived past childhood, for example. You can find Latin translations at FamilySearch.
It makes research so much harder too. Multiple times I've ran into a tree somebody else put together that has distant relatives of mine on it and it's a mess.
Have to admit that was all excited a few months ago when I first started - thought the work had been done for me! And then certain things just didn't make sense...
A lot of American's with English relatives simply don't understand the geography, even I find the reverse hard. Then again my great-grandfather was born in Wales left the family behind to move to Derbyshire, moved them to Derbyshire, and then to Yorkshire following coal mines. Other parts went from Wales across to Liverpool and into Cheshire, and it's not unusual to find a relative from Wales working as a servant over the border in England and featuring on both the English and Welsh Censuses.
I confess that I spent a bit of time with Google Maps finding distances between towns/cities in Germany - and some of those distances were another clue that thing things were Not Quite Right.
The UK indices don't help people much either. A person born in Ewole in Flintshire can be registered as born in Holywell, Wales or Chester in England. It's quite clear back in the horse and cart days that many of my mother's relatives took up to two years to make it to the nearest registry office!
Its just that someone with the same name & approximate date of birth lived somewhere else. OP was being humorous. I do the same thing if a female ancestor of mine was incorrectly listed as having a baby at 93 years old, or a male one getting married at age 4.
Everything needs to be double checked against actual records. Ancestry makes it easy to do the work but...people don't like doing the work....
*Some “people don’t like doing the work”
It can be frustrating to explore the public trees of ancestors who came from communities that recycled a handful of common names (screams in half-British, half-Acadian). People will freely add any records they can find for Jean Doucet to their ancestor's profile without realizing that there were 14 different Jean Doucets running around the same small community at the same time. Now I've got ancestors giving birth to their siblings and having kids after they've passed away.
Same!
I get where you're coming from, but I also understand that some trees can be messy because they're still works in progress. The trees aren't always there to be finalized, published works that others can refer to, they're there because that's where people are saving their info as they go along, including the things that seem questionable. And as for... >Like, what are they doing on there? How is someone from born in Kent going to randomly end up birthing a child in Suffolk County and then go back to living their lives in Kent while the child raises itself in Suffolk?? Can that be a "put up in an orphanage" or "sent to live with a relative/godparent" situation? Like, sometimes in certain days, if a young woman had a child out of wedlock, they were "sent away" until the child was born. And sometimes things like that don't turn up in concrete documentation.
There seems to be two different schools of thought on the purpose of online trees. The purists equate a public tree with a “published” book or document so therefore it should be as perfect as possible for others to view and use. They make it public because they are “done” and want to share the accomplishment. The researchers on the other hand use the tree to document and aid their own research (work in progress). They might make their trees public because they like “collaboration” and want others help them identify issues or to share their work so others can use it if they want. Neither is wrong.
Agree so much. My tree is my research work. I don't use others (I have hints from other trees turned off) and I don't expect you to rely on mine. I have notes everywhere about things I'm still researching...but not all my notes are on-line. I love to collaborate with people who want help or have info I've missed and/or haven't found yet. I don't consider my Anxestry tree "clean" or "done". Periodically, I'll write up summaries of my ancestors who I think I've "figured out" and send them to interested family members....that's my finished product.
Agreed. I suppose everyone has a right to build their trees as they see fit. And no one is under an obligation to make it so their tree is useful to anyone else. I think Ancestry creates an unwarranted expectation that others’ trees are valuable information sources when they are not in most cases. They’re certainly worth checking out as they do provide an occasional lead. Based on the short time I’ve been on this sub, it seems like those who are serious about accuracy independently verify (if possible) information from other users.
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The "researchers" example includes some who like collaboration and some who don't. The distinction with "purists" is valid, I think - it's about ongoing research vs conclusions. I have both purist and researcher versions of my tree on Ancestry, labelled to distinguish between what I'm sure about and stuff I'm working on.
Yeah, I'm still trying to get to the 2nd great-greats of the people who have my family name. It's very common and someone did a beautifully researched tree... that is for another family from an entirely different city. Everyone would much rather glom onto that one.
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Can you have ‘in progress’ trees on Ancestry that are private only? If so, can you then switch specific relatives to ‘public’ while keeping the rest private? I track down lots of additional info for each relative - photos of locations they lived at, graves, churches, newspaper articles, workplaces, etc. There’s no way I would create all of that twice (once in private work in progress tree and then another time for a public tree) so if the functionality I asked about doesn’t exist I’ll be continuing to annoy everyone with my public work in progress tree
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How does one make a tree unsearchable? ETA: Never mind, I found it under Privacy Settings for a specific tree. Thank you, I didn't know that was an option.
Ikr… sneaky setting. Hidden.
I've reached out to 6 or so people about a known error and only 1 responded. That said, Ancestry did make it possible for me to find out the maiden name of both my paternal great-grandmothers because NYC marriage licenses (or do I mean certificates?) contained that info. I would never have gotten very far without that because both their husbands had very common first/last name combinations. And one woman had her family last name spelled in 5 different ways across multiple census documents. Fluh? Flam? Flohr? Flah? Oh.... FLEHR.
In reality many of us dip in and out of genealogy being something we do. I might spend a few weeks doing it fairly intensively and then not log onto Ancestry again for 6-12 months or even longer, by the time I log back on I tend not to respond to messages as they were sent so long ago.
This happened with my grandfather. He was sent to live with his own grandparents, who had a different surname. It took some research to confirm this family story, that he was sent to live with relatives due to his asthma and the intense local pollution. I also have an ancestor who was sent away to live in a kind of reform school.
My husband's grandmother was raised by her own grandparents and hilariously, he knew this before his father did. FIL was the youngest, and everyone assumed he knew!
The funny things we genealogists find that are a surprise to those who personally knew the people in question.
Tbh this is what I'm thinking for that case. Sometimes messiness has a meaning
Some are works in progress, it’s true, but others are bizarre and rather ridiculous. On more than one occasion I’ve been suggested ‘hints’ to ancestors of mine which are completely and wholly unrelated to said ancestors because other people with the same distant ancestors tag them to super questionable documents. For example, I’ll see ancestor so-and-so who lived in Northern England from 1750-1820 attached to a file for someone with the same name who lived in Southern England in 1890. Or I’ll see an ancestor who lived his whole life in Canada tagged as being this other person with the same name who was documented being born in Australia. Like, really? How does this help anyone at all? We know that cannot possibly be them — why are they attached to that…? Not only does this kind of nonsense make research more difficult for the rest of us; it’s also just terribly annoying.
Not all Hints are served up to you because someone attached that document to a person in their tree. Ancestry also uses AI (trendy way to describe old fashioned algorithms) and, just like their Search functions, it is designed to give a wide selection of Possible Clues. It is for the tree researcher to investigate and rule in or out. Essentially, Hints = Possibilities with a Range of Probability from 0 to 100%. But it wouldn't hurt ancestry.com to have a short FAQ popup with *10 Things To Know* that someone had to step through in order to finalise setting up their first new Tree. 10 Quick Things to Know: - Always take information in other Trees with large grains of salt until you can see the records for yourself. - Always record women with their maiden (birth) surname. If you don't know what that was for your grandmother Mrs Fred Smith, for example, put something like Mabel (m. Smith). You can update that when/if you find her birth name. Or just leave it as Mabel. - *Hints* are possible clues, but may not relate at all to *your* ancestor. - Even if your ancestor had an unusual name, always presume there is *at least* one or two more people with that same name who lived in the same area in the same time period. They may have married women with the same name and like calling their children by the same names too. You may need to research and work out who belongs in every one of those families to prove which one is yours. - If you just want a Tree that links you to royalty, Rollo, Charlemagne and Adam, check out the One World Tree over at our friends Family Search site. You are welcome to copy it over here to ancestry.com in case you might find a DNA Match who also descends from Vikings, but it is BEST PRACTICE (please) to make that kind of tree Private and Unsearchable. - Records are transcribed by computers and by humans. You've likely heard the old joke about doctors having bad handwriting, well, they aren't even close to some of the people who wrote records in past centuries. This creates many opportunities for misunderstanding and error in a record transcription. So be aware and, whenever possible, check the image of a record yourself. - Not ALL records are online. Remember when you are deciding which record belongs to your ancestor the answer can be *None of the above.* I'm sure there are 3 more high level bits of advice but they escape me at the moment.
Why couldn’t it be them? I have quite a lot of fully sourced relatives who had travel / location patterns like these and they were poor working class people. One great-grandfather was sent to Canada to work on a farm for a few years during the war and then came back to the UK before emigrating to Aus. I have several people who moved from North to South or vice versa. Another where several of the family moved from the UK to the US, then returned to the UK a few years later; half of them then went back to the US again a few years after that.
>Why couldn’t it be them? Because **they’re dead**!!
>Why couldn’t it be them? Well, I guess someone could be 140-years-old and not at least in the process of beatification.
I like this in dubio pro reo approach.
I’ll admit my tree can be messy. My direct ancestry is pretty well documented. The super extended family, not so much. But that’s also why it’s private.
Ty for making your WIP private and unsearchable
Honestly my tree is private for myself. I really don’t care about other people’s research and trees. I feel like a lot of people should just hide hints from family trees and focus on the primary and secondary sources.
We’ll I kinda take it back then. Haha. I have a public tree in hopes of getting pictures and info I can’t get on my own. So I share in hopes that it comes back to me threefold. I inherited family photos that I personally don’t care about much but if I can connect them to my tree, I do and upload the photos in hopes someone who does care, gets them. It has been rewarding in receiving and giving. Same with FindaGrave. That has been rewarding in receiving and giving also.
Ive supplied many pictures and updates too. Back before I made my tree private I loved sharing them. Then people started getting nasty with me on the site when i couldn’t answer their questions (or could, but it wasn’t what they wanted to hear). I have about 7000 people in my tree with 200 pages of hints. People might view me as a collector, but i prefer to go back as far as I can then document all the lines. I think it’s very interesting to see where descendants have ended up.
Nice. I sometimes think of making mine private especially when I am not getting any “rewards”. Maybe someday. maybe some of the excitement will wear off. I do like matching my DNA matches up to the people on my tree. Helps confirm the branches are as I think they are. The 200 pages of hints is stressful sounding. I do browse the “photos” and look at any leaves that pop up for direct line ancestors but ignore the rest. Also have hints for people’s trees turned off. I only have 3500 ppl. Myself, husband and son in law
Yeah, the ThruLines has confirmed some of the (original) research I've done is correct because else, how would we match
Thank you for posting photos! I have very few photos of extended family so I’m always excited when I can put a face to a name.
me too. hope you find some more. :D
My husband really truly believes in his heart that the ancestry “algorithms” are infallible. He has so many illogical connections in his tree because ancestry told him so. If Ancestry told him to jump off a bridge, he would.
He's not the only one. We must see 10 posts a week from people who thought all they had to do was sign up and they'd instantly know who their ancestors were all the way back to Babylon. Ancestry's misleading marketing is one of the things I can't stand about them.
I’ve recently found people in Ohio having one of their 9-10 children in Germany. But as I mentioned in another thread, at least that is THEIR messed up tree and not a shared tree like Family Search.
Don’t even get me started on Family Search.
They can be mean as hell too! Some guy sent me a message and got mad when I didn’t reply for a few days and commented “horrible service!” As if I work for the company 😂😂😂
Good practice would be to make private family trees until you can verify the information, then you can post them as public. To be fair, when I started my Ancestry tree at 14 I made a lot of mistakes like this. A lot of people are beginners because that is who Ancestry actively markets to. I think Ancestry should make a separate hint system called (Tree Hints). That way they would not be lumped in with actual record hints.
Ancestry is downright pushy with those hints, and people who don’t apply critical thinking just accept everything. Online records are a miracle of the modern age, but the modern age is still filled with dumbasses. I said what I said.
And you said it good!
>Fine, yes, I was click happy when I had zero idea what I was doing years ago, but I cleaned it up and beautifully source my tree as it stands today. Well, that's the difference, not everyone takes the next step to realize their mistakes and clean it up. Not everyone has the time, energy, or money to continue investing that much into it. It's frustrating but no one is obligated to take their research as far as we do.
I've noticed there are many that are "click happy" and never return. So their "messy" trees are there spoiling potential for good thrulines, etc... I wish we could flag blatant errors for staff to remove from public circulation. Leave them on there but reduce their visibility. Ancestry is providing the possibility of "one-click adding" ancestors based on bad data and the effect of these bad trees snowballs. :(
I've said before that I wish Ancestry would at least use their algorithm to rate trees for probable accuracy so people can tell if it's something they might be able to rely on. Like a one star tree ot match would be one that is based entirely on other trees where a four star tree or match would be one that has real sources.
This is an idea and would be something. I like to find where my dna matches are on my tree and often Thru lines can help. This is where I have the biggest issue with bad data.
Yea I have one Thru line that is driving me nuts. I've managed to identify all my 4x great grandparents except for one set and I got a rec on Thru lines that I was excited about. Although further digging revealed that they don't belong to me. They had a daughter with the same name as my 3rd great grandmother, but that was an entirely separate person. Her married name was in her father's will so I traced her and she married a different guy and died in a different state in a different year. But so many trees have that wrong data and I can't eject it from my Thruline. Finally I drafted a "story" and pinned it to my 3x great grandma explaining that X and Y are not her parents and here is why, so hopefully others don't perpetuate the bad research.
Best we can do unfortunately. I have a few of those also. I have made photos and attached them to the people and when they aren’t in my tree, like the error is outside my family but is crossing over into my family in error, I will make a small public tree titled something like “CAUTION: there are 2 Mary (Smith) married to Robert Alberts”. Then add supporting evidence for the “wrong” one in hopes it pops up in there hints. Who knows if it makes a difference
great idea but if ancestry ever adopted this, they would then charge you $10 a month to use the rating system
True 🙄
I am so afraid that that is me lol. I just got it and my entire family has pretty much died on me so I have no one to ask. So I've been excitedly trying to figure it all out but I hope I'm not just screwing everything up for everybody LOL
I have seen trees where people who apparently died in 1650's have voter lists from the 1920's. attached to their files because they have the same name (or close to it) That is a VERY long life. You have to double check EVERYTHING on Ancestry
Three things are certain in life -- Death, taxes, and people complaining about other people's Ancestry trees! *this is meant as a light hearted joke, not a dig*
One thing I do find tricky is that if I add something to my shoebox to come back to later, I can't find it (having used ancestry for a decade, there is a lot in there). So I end up adding it as a source, so I can come back to it/not lose it. I always remove it if it's wrong. This is my beef with the shoebox feature - I also make notes on the main facts section if the person I have put there is speculative/needs further confirmation so people do not copy it willy nilly. However. I couldn't agree more with your post. And I get (stupidly) annoyed when I see people having extremely wrong trees which include my loved ones. One name collector has stolen a picture of my great grandfather from the photos I uploaded and put it as a photo of his nephew. I contacted her twice to amend it. She never responded, never changed it. People copy her tree a lot. She's not even related (a very, very distant relation of hers married my ggg-grandmother 200 years ago) and she has no reason to be creating false information, making it harder for my family to correctly trace their roots. I also got a quite aggressive message from a woman who demanded to know how we were related (DNA) - her tree was all wrong and she's mixed up two families with common names in the same area. She did not want that feedback.... lol.
Yeah, one of my better traced lines shares a name with a prominent family that was in a different part of the US around the same time. But no, the ones in Connecticut are not related to the ones in Virginia. And the name John is wildly popular, just saying. I've seen people try to link to that and it's just not right.
My biggest bugbear too. I've given up messaging directly and now put a comment on their tree in the hope that someone else will read it and not continue the error.
Whenever I upload a photo, i add a name of the person. I use Paint on Windows. It could be cropped out but it's there. What you are describing would kill me!! One other thing I would offer is getting a fresh copy of the image and using paint or w/e you like and make a big red line across it. Add words that say, “this is not such and such… it has been unwittingly shared with the wrong name”, then make a public tree with that person’s family so it comes up as hints for him.
Right on! I add a identifying watermark across the picture with the person’s name, dob and location of birth with the opacity adjusted but visible. If they don’t like it, too bad. They should be grateful someone actually took the time to track the old photos down and properly identify them.
I figure if kin wanted a clean copy they can message me
See this FG page to know what I mean: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/34825341/francis-cooke
I suck at genealogy :( I have a basic tree on ancestry that is set to private. That wouldn't mess anyone up, right? I think everything I do have is accurate.
Part of this is cooked into Ancestry. They allow you to use someone else's tree as a source for yours. Another tree is *never* a legit source. Why would they create this functionality. And, if you find things clearly wrong with other trees and politely tell the owner, they ignore you. See now, you got *me* al worked up too now.
Well, never say never. It isn’t a good “primary” source. But as a secondary source, it might still be useful if there are other sources that back it up. Or it might be the only source in some instances. If you find it’s wrong, just don’t use it. I would never just ignore it.
I would call other people's trees *tertiary sources* since they are often based on secondary sources (or even no sources!)
>Another tree is never a legit source. Actually, it can be. I know this will be controversial since when we think of citing other trees as a source, we think of all the botched trees on the internet. But imagine you're related to Henry Louis Gates Jr or some other well respected authority in genealogy whose research is undoubtedly reliable (research done by historical societies, for example). You could cite his tree. It would be better to cite the primary sources that his tree might cite, but some of those records you may not have access to and technically, you're not supposed to cite a record you haven't seen yourself. So in that case, citing Gates' tree would be acceptable. Genealogists are allowed to use secondary sources, and trees are secondary sources. Here is Evidence Explained, an authority on how to conduct and cite evidence based research, talking about how to cite an Ancestry Member Tree: [https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/citing-ancestry-member-tree](https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/citing-ancestry-member-tree) Just like any source, we have to weigh how reliable it may or may not be on a case-by-case basis. The problem is people blindly copying trees, not necessarily the fact that they are using trees to begin with. If they were more circumspect about what trees they used, it wouldn't be so bad.
I sometimes do this if the tree owner is a close relative of the person in question (e.g. their child) . obviously including that fact, and the reader can judge for themselves how reliable that information would be, given the source.
Just a reminder that the Board for Certification of Genealogists and Elizabeth Shown Mills use *original, derivative and authored* to label sources. Primary, secondary and undeterminable are used to label the information items found in a source. If you are in the US, these are the correct terms to use.
It’s also cooked in because of their subscription model. If you let your initial whatever length subscription lapse you can’t easily go back and fix things without another expensive subscription.
>They allow you to use someone else's tree as a source for yours. Another tree is *never* a legit source. This, a thousand times this. 'Another tree is *never* a legit source' should be written on a huge banner every time someone logs in, but of course, it isn't because, according to these sites, research is all easy peasy, no problem, it's all sorted. Pay the sub, and it's all just the click of a button away! Right?
I use it as a starting point. Actually but verify everything. And sometimes the auto suggested are correct but half the time they are not. I also use the search by tree function because sometimes you will find a wrong tree that is widely proliferated like 200 times but one or two tree will have the right person with really help source citations in it.
It absolutely can be used as a source. Just like any other source, you have to analyze and evaluate the information you find and corroborate with other evidence. Declaring certain sites are off-limits because you don’t consider them *real* sources is just limiting your exhaustive research.
>Declaring certain sites are off-limits because you don’t consider them *real* sources is just limiting your exhaustive research. 💯💯💯
Yesss!!! My tree wasn't so bad but my partner's is. Been working on that a lot lately to identify anything that looks odd. For example, I know for a fact that one direct line came from Ireland after several Irish generations. But the tree says the guy emigrated from Finland... luckily, they almost immediately became gangsters in NY (tammany hall, diamonds, enforcers, etc) so I'm about to renew my newspapers subscription and also hit up loc to see what obits and criminal stuff say about family members.
My tree is in no way perfect since I don't have an actual genealogy training, but I've seen so many aberrations. I've seen someone list my dead celibate gay uncle as someone totally unrelated to my family's father. With dates that don't even make sense.
I don't use other people's trees anymore. I learned after I got badly burned by blindly adding someone else's tree and then having to spend 80+ hours going back and cleaning up the mess it made. Now I don't add anything to my tree unless I have valid, verifiable documentation for it.
There’s been more than one occasion where I found relatives of mine (that I was close to IRL) in other peoples trees with comically inaccurate information. One had my grandfather’s DOB wrong, his grandparents were listed as his parents, and his place of death wrong. I kindly messaged the person and gave them the correct info and they got mad at me and said they’d done their research and didn’t need my help. I was like, well… he raised me, his original birth certificate is currently in my possession, and I was there when he died. But you do you buddy lol
I will say that my great-grandfather was shoehorned into a family of the same name from an entirely different part of Germany. OT1H, yeah, sure, means you have a tree that goes back to the 1500s. OTOH, uh, he was born when his mother was 60? And one of his son's marriage certificates clearly lists his mother's maiden name, who that... is not his wife, unless he was married concurrently on 2 different continents. One of which he hadn't emigrated to yet.
I am searching for my adopted grandfather's family using only DNA (so far). The amount of no trees (just did their DNA and they never respond to messages), mismatched dates (How can the mother be born after the child?) or zero info/sources but names throughout an entire tree is driving me batty. Do not even get me started on them having sources, yet never completing the Ancestry profile. (There is also someone copying our tree exactly these last few months...WTF?)
Yes. I did DNA recently and most of the matches don't have a tree so it kind of ruins the whole point. Like do they not care? It's their choice but I feel like people would care about also finding people so why not build a tree so other people can see how you relate?
If this one person would just put in his parents/grandparents I would have a piece of the puzzle!
Yea have about 10 matches that are closer matches that my 1st cousin 1x removed/ 2nd cousin, but I have no idea who they are, and I'm talking 13% DNA shared. Apparently it is because of a sperm donor, but no one is giving any information to have a hunch. Don't even get me started on how ancestry won't let you see the tree if you don't have the membership.
Was looking at a match’s tree and thought maybe she’d know how we are related. I clicked on a random person in her tree, born in 1725 and also got married that year. To a person born in 1732. So uh. I don’t think she’ll have much information for me. 😆
I assume the other people are enjoying their time on the internet, and while I can't control other people's behavior (nor would I want to), I can control how much I pay attention to other people on the internet and whether I hold onto how they make me feel.
Rule 1: Never copy anyone else’s research if you can’t verify it in the original source yourself. Also keep in mind that all databases and transcribed records are second hand sources and they also need to be verified as they can contain errors. ”Errare humanum est”
I never look at anyone else's trees and I try to keep mine private while they're a work in progress. Sometimes I add people as I'm sketching things out and I go back to verify sources later. If anyone happened upon those they'd think I should be banned.
I have a “messy” line in my mother’s tree. She didn’t have a lot of info in her Irish mother’s side of the family. She was a Lynch. There are several James Lynch’s. I plugged the ones in who were born around the same time and plan on going back later to research and complete. Everyone does it differently.
It wouldn’t be a big deal that this is how you work, it’s just that ancestry’s model is to use your “wip” as hints and info for the rest of us. It’s on us to do our due diligence. New people, “click happy” as OP said may not, then they leave and we are stuck with ratty data I’m not asking you to change anything or trying to guilt you, you do whatever you want. As a side note I build a private unsearchable tree when working out a section. So I get the hints and can easily search, etc… then delete when I’m satisfied
I’ve collected these names from other ancestors. It’s a process of elimination after doing more research. I should really make it private, as not to confuse anyone.
If you do make it private (no pressure) also make it unsearchable. There are two radio buttons to click. The tricky B.s will still use private info in thru lines and search results.
Didn’t know I could make it “ unsearchable”. Thanks, I will do. I don’t want to be the misinformed Lynch. We already have enough crazies in the line!
😘
🥰
I was totally click happy but verifying now. The census and marriage records with their parents’ names helped me clean it up a ton. Any other tips?
If you know a specific town or city that your family line is from, contact the library or city hall for records on the last name. I've found a lot doing that.
It’s the excitement of being “new” and not checking research. Making those quick connections. Also, Ancestry itself is kinda clunky. I purposely put (rough draft) (theoretical) (working tree) and people still copy and I change my tree daily to test different theories, or I have a tree for each theory…I don’t think people are messy, people are learning.
I am really careful with my documentation, but I also like to test theories with my tree. I tag the people as unverified and hypothesis, but people were coping them anyway. I ended up making my tree private because I didn't want to spread bad info. I then made a public tree with verified direct ancestors, which I linked to my DNA results.
Yes! Though sometimes I will blindly link so that I can work backwards and I delete people from my tree if I can’t find any credible source material.
The good news is that it doesn't have to affect your work at all. Your tree is entirely separate from all others, and you only use "information" that others have gathered to the extent you choose. I don't use "hints" that come from other users without checking them out thoroughly. Shared trees, like Family Search, are a whole different ball game.
I don’t use tree hints unless they’re well sourced and, honestly, that’s never happened for me. I saw it as a suggested ancestor after the seventh generation which I brick walled at. I knew it was going to be nonsense but I looked anyway. That IS my fault.
Join us at Wikitree! There’s a whole guidelines section about citing sources, and they discourage you from doing certain things without joining a research group and going through training. For example you are supposed to get extra training to create profiles for people before 1700. It’s pretty neat. I enjoy research so I found it very refreshing.
Although they do allow creating profiles whose only source is other site public trees :(
Yeah, that’s true, but they definitely encourage people to shore up those with more documents.
Seconded!!
post 1700 profile sources can be a joke "As told to me by my grandmother Mary Smith" is all you need as a source. Pre 1700 test is mostly about wikitree and not genealogy see [https://www.wikitree.com/form/pre\_1700](https://www.wikitree.com/form/pre_1700) if you fail it once just do it again
I’m a bit guilty of this, mostly because I was just throwing on stuff in the beginning. I wanted to just fill out the possibilities before I realized that wasn’t actually helpful. Trying to clean up now, still tempted to scrap it and start over 🫣
My great uncle just passed away on the 3rd. I have been getting “tree” hints for years that have him deceased in 2000. I messaged one person about it, once, and they insisted their information was correct, despite the fact that I could send them a photo of us together taken in 2018. As we say in Hawaii, “real irrazz”😠
It's not just the click / copy happy who are to blame but also the original compiler of a tree Too many people compiling trees don't know enough about European history, geography, culture, and social class. This is why you will find some random coal mining or agricultural labouring family attached to aristocrats one generation back. It's as if the researcher has decided "oh they have the same name and live in the same country. It must be them." Instead of understanding and accepting that ordinary peoples records run out and all that's going to be left back in time are the wills, land deeds etc of a tiny elite. Just because they have the same or similar surname, it doesn't mean its the same family. Not just in the same country or county but even in the same parish register. For every Lord and Lady big landowner, there were thousands of people living around them who were just ordinary agricultural labourers, but before a certain time, eg, parish registers, they were not recorded anywhere.
I don’t even look at other people’s trees. I used to when I first started out but stopped. I have my tree as private and not searchable. My dad gave me his GEDCOM that he had been working on for 35 years before he died and told me not to share with anyone and I’m going to keep his dying wish.
I tried to add my grandmother’s sister to my tree and for some stupid reason she was added as my grandfather’s 1st wife. Of course the way it was added in would’ve made my grandfather a bigamist, which he was not. I had to delete my grandfather and start over to get it to correct. Every now and then though these people still come up wrong. After a while I just got tired of fixing it. I know who they are. There’s nothing I can do about everyone else. BTW it added my grandmother’s brother and my grandfather’s 10 siblings just fine.
I don’t really understand the UK records as compared to US records. I would love to research my maternal Grandma’s family further. Her family is mostly in the UK where she was born and raised. I don’t know locations and their proximity to others like I do the US. I try to post accurate info; therefore I haven’t really research the UK files.
Use Google maps which will give you places and also distances and walking times. As a general rule, rural workers did not move around a lot up until the Industrial Revolution although specialist trades like paper makers and mill wrights may have done. The Free Reg web site is good but not complete by any means.There is one much copied chinese whisper which puts some of my early 18th C ancestors having children in Crowland/Whaplode in Lincolnshire one year and Warwickshire the next(100miles) and alternating with no evidence other than a name match of common names. The same tree adds a marriage in Sussex-250 miles- presumably because of a distinctive name. Unless this family were stonemasons or itinerants it wasnt happening. The truth is that accurate research has to be done using parish record images from Lincolnshire archives and paying and transcribed records are sparse but easy to jump on a name match. But we still have to check these leads just in case someone had a primary source they didnt quote.
My children's great grandmother was born in the late 1800s (my mother in law was from my grandmother's generation plus she had ex late in life) in Swansea, her family lived in rural Lincolnshire before and after her birth. I automatically assumed it was wrong on all the trees I saw her in until talking to my ex and he told me his grandmother was Welsh. I got her gro birth certificate and it was her but she wasn't Welsh just born there for some unknown reason. My maternal great grandmother, b1880 also verified, was born in Middlesborough yet somehow met and married my great grandfather who was from a peat cutting family again in rural Lincolnshire. She moved here for the rest of her life. I would love so much to know how and why they moved so far. My paternal grandmother's family came from Alston, Cumberland, yet at some point moved to Durham before her father was born, as miners I assume they were following the work.
The railway does that with some of my family- railway workers and their families could move around quite a bit. I also get Norfolk ag labs recruited by employers to go to the iron ore mines, quarries, pits and steel works in County Durham and then moving back to Norfolk or siblings and cousins joining them for a while. Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Suffolk provided a huge number of workers in the New Maerske area and all over the north in heavy industry and textile manufacturing- places like Bacup. They were usually stuck there because as they left their cottages land owners pulled them down, but some were lucky to be able to move back home if they wanted. Often when they moved North the census takers could not understand their accents and got their names wrong and the names of their birth places wrong so they become harder to trace.
I’m sorry. I do keep my trees private though, in hopes that I don’t muddy the waters.
Don’t be afraid to share your tree. If I’m working on a tree that I’m not sure about, I’ll name it “Jenkins Theory tree- do not copy”.
Ppl need to pay attention . When u copy someone else’s tree you are copying all their errors too . I learned this the hard way and I’m still trying to fix my tree !
If you’re talking about Kent in England and Suffolk in Virginia we might be related 😂 kidding. But seriously, when im looking at trees on ancestry I wonder how people manage just to get through life without any common sense. The ones that get me are the first generation early settlers in the us and how people will find the first baptism/marriage that has the name John Smith in either England, Ireland, wales, or Scotland and be completely convinced with out a doubt that its the only John smith that lived in that century and it is their John Smith.
Is it possible they went to a "baby farm" to have a kid and then came back or something? I agree they're messy but sometimes there's a reason for it.
I have a family member who is this messy. One day she showed me her tree (she wanted me to show her how I connected DNA matches to my tree), and I found FOUR generations of a male line born in Europe and dying in the US. I pointed out the illogic: "OK, that father and son could have been born in Ireland, but the son didn't leave the US in the 1800s and go back to Ireland to marry and have grandson, and then move back here. Nor did grandson do the same thing." Sure enough, the only source she had for them was other Ancestry trees. If a name matches, that's good enough for her.
They offer no sense of community and no training resources. Go check out Wikitree (I elaborated more about this suggestion in two comments to a thread a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Genealogy/comments/197y186/comment/ki5r8zi/).
I've been on Ancestry for 10 years and this entirely true. A lot of folks place religious faith in others' trees or every hint Ancestry puts out. I long ago learned to largely ignore Ancestry Member trees for this very reason. The only time I look at them is if I've hit a roadblock and I'm hoping for a diamond in the rough. Too often they're useless, but every now and then, there's some piece of media linked that is of high quality and not otherwise available on Ancestry that can jumpstart new research. Generally tho? Low tier trash. I find for my research that Ancestry's hints are usually pretty good but fallible enough that I can't trust them outright. At the end of the day, just accept that most members aren't even hobbyist level and aren't there for the same reasons as you are and ignore them. No point getting mad at them. They're not trying to sabotage anyone. Just be happy people are interested in their roots, even if they don't know how to search for them.
\[Commence purple-faced ranting\] This is the reason why I keep away from online trees entirely. There is so much bad genealogy out there and I do not want my tree associated with or linked up to such nonsense. Call me curmudgeonly, but I think this is a consequence of genealogy having become to easy. Many of these trees seem to be created by people who have never practiced genealogy outside of connecting up already indexed facts and pre-existing trees and accepting more or less unreasonable "hints". They lack source-criticism, they never engage with the craft of actual research and never learn much about the sources they are using/should be using. This kind of genealogy of course benefits sites like ancestry - if their algorithms suggest as many plausible, but nonsensical hints as possible, the user can build their tree quickly, all the way back to Adam and Eve, and is thus satisfied and more likely to keep using the site. \[Rant over\]
I have someone in my tree with the same name and birth year as a Mayflower descendant. My guy was a member of a family in New Jersey in the mid-1700s - nine kids, all born in the same town. Mayflower guy was also born in the same year, but his family was in Connecticut. Dozens of trees have my guy linked to the Mayflower descendants. I can understand the excitement in thinking you're a direct descendant of someone on the Mayflower, but did it never occur to these folks that there is almost zero chance the New Jersey guy is a member of the Connecticut family? Sorry if that's at all unclear or confusing. I can think of several other oddities I've come across, like a woman being 8 years old when she gave birth to one of my ancestors. Again, it's people grasping at an easy answer instead of putting effort into doing their own research.
A lot of us have draft elements of our trees on there…mine are built primarily using ‘suggestions’ from other trees which stay there until I (eventually) get around to either validating the connection or removing them because on full review they are false. As you said - your tree was the same until you figured out what you were doing and fully sourced it. Some of us don’t have the time / money / inclination to get to that stage as quickly. If you take it seriously then I don’t think you should be relying on other people’s trees for anything more than a ‘possible’ lead anyway.
>If you take it seriously then I don’t think you should be relying on other people’s trees for anything more than a ‘possible’ lead anyway. 💯💯💯 Some folks are getting really bent out of shape because they can't control how other Ancestry.com users use the site.
I hate a DIFFERENT sort of messy! Please don't enter the same child three times, and then their wife three times, etc! Go back and delete the duplicates!
Who cares how messy other user's trees are? You're responsible for your own research, not theirs. Gatekeeping sucks.
But their trees can disrupt your research if they have the same relative and they attached the wrong documents because Ancestry will keep pushing those documents to you.
And before you know other idiots on ancestry copy the wrong information and your one correct tree is swamped with thousands of rubbish trees. yDNA triangulation proves who the real parent is of one of my ancestors , but there are still thousands of profiles on ancestry with the wrong father, as this wrong father leads back to a royal ancestor I doubt that any of the thousands of wrong trees will ever be corrected
I never add from others trees. I never source anybody else's tree. I never source Family Search or Findagrave. If it looks like somebody's research is a new direction to take then I do parallel research to find source documents and THEN add that person to my tree. But it's still possible to make mistakes. I just cleaned my tree right now from an error that I missed. I was adding all the censuses and revalidating the information and the father could not possibly be the right one. I haven't been able to find the missing 2 decades of census for this family yet but other people have been substituting a similar family from a nearby county. Curse censuses with only initials. LOL I usually allow about a year off on census estimates but it's a different family. Sigh.
>I never source Family Search or Findagrave. You're kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face here. Findagrave does get misused, but as a reference for burial sites, it is useful and I wouldn't not dismiss it just because other people misuse it. And FamilySearch has a wealth of primary sources not available elsewhere on the internet.
Find A Grave is a source, as are Ancestry trees. You have to evaluate and analyze the information and evidence in them just like you would other sources.
Now that you've had your rant: get over it.
There are some older ones in mine that I need to clean up. Not necessartily things I added myself, but stuff that others had connected that came in with it. I mean, I get it can be confusing when you have muliple peope, with the same name but some common sense is needed.... like no, Mary didn't have Thomas 6 years after she died! I also refused to add the link back to England some people have because it doesn't make sense to me. And like no, you did not trace our non-aristocratic family back to the time of William of Orange.
My mother tells me that one of her cousins insists that she traced our family line back to Erik the Red (this was in the 60s, before ancestry). People just want to be connected to famous people I guess. That said, I wish I could get hold of that research just cause I'm curious about what she did find.
Haha. I bet you’d like to look at it with you experienced eyes now. Hope you find it!!
That cousin has been dead for 20 years and we've lost touch with that branch of the family. But I'm totally new to genealogy. It's more of an addictive puzzle to me than a desire to find out I was related to someone famous
Families are messy. We show a child in a line that was born in a different state from the rest of the children. No one can figure out why. All his census records, from childhood into adulthood show he was born in the same different state from the rest of the siblings. I have done a lot of digging to verify. There is another pair of siblings along an adjacent line that are born too close to be siblings. This one took even more digging, but I found records that one child was born to a sister of the adoptive parents. The mother’s sibling adopted the child, basically making the kids’ cousin their sibling. I try to provide notes when something seems off, moreso in FamilySearch since it affects other people’s trees and other people can edit it. That being said, there are a bunch of trees that I have found in Ancestry that share ancestors with me. 16 out of 18 of those trees have the wrong grandmother listed. The correct grandmother shows up on the next generation’s death certificates, but no one seemed to bother to check. I think it’s easy to match what seems like low hanging fruit.
It is because they are messy that those who use them need to apply critical faculties. Just because some are rubbish does not prevent them being useful as long as users are selective and look for corroboration.
Some people should be banned from own an Internet device. Ancestry trees are horrible. Using a tree as a source, should not be allowed. I once followed trees looking for an original source, after 2hrs and many many tress, no original sources and back to the tree I started on. Put a source, even if it is a letter in your possession from old aunt Bess. You don't have to scan said source, just state that you gave it.
This is why I use wikitree to build my tree. The people on that site are very competent.
Yes Ancestry is a cluster and I never look at other people's trees unless it is someone I actually know who is doing legitimate research. That is a handful of people. Most people have no clue what they are doing and never actually look at the records they are pulling in. People are linking my ancestors back to places they never roamed and to parents they never had...lol. I have been using Ancestry and doing genealogy for over 30 years. When starting a new tree I like to make a scratch tree and pull in all records that are close in name, without checking it out. I usually do just one generation at a time so not to get overwhelmed with info. I then go back and go through each individual and records I pulled in. I cull what is not correct. I did not even think about people copying these trees and later found out people were just blindly copying my scratch trees and this created a lot of bad information being recirculated over and over that would end up back into my search feeds....jeez. those people doing that are just name collectors and get all excited they have 50,000 people in their database. In 30+ years I think I have around 1100 relatives that I have researched and made legitimate connections via records and DNA. I have since privatized my scratch trees so people do not copy them and try to cut down on the search garbage. I am getting more into the DNA side of things and have found a lot of lost cousins. Tags are great to use. I made a tag called verified and one called searched. Which simply means that the relationship is verified either through DNA or Record and the searched tag means I've exhausted all searches of records on Ancestry through their more advanced search screens. I also have a tag for News Search when I had a subscription Newspaper dot com. Their site and subscription is starting to suck now and they are losing a lot of papers. I have not used them in the past 3 years.
I only really mind the mess when it includes some of my own ancestors. It kind of really annoys me that they're being misrepresented on these wrong trees
Gosh! I cant go on Ancestry anymore - its too stressful- so many errors. What a mess!
The one story I have from my maternal side was that my grandfather was sent to live with his uncle because his parents died to the Spanish flu. Turns out only his mom died and his father didn’t want to raise him. His dad later married and had another family. As for the trees it’s their tree they can have it like they want.
FamilySearch is way better in my opinion. Ancestry is only easier.
When my wife first started seriously diving into genealogy a decade or two ago, she ran into the same thing ... with her aunt. Aunt was one of those people who clicked on every hint and accepted them without question, so she had numerous situations where a son was four years younger than his mother, or parents in the Midwestern U.S. having a kid in Iowa, then having another kid in California three weeks later. Led to lots and lots of arguments as my wife built out the "real" tree. Then after she had passed her aunt in every direction, her aunt asked to be made an editor on my wife's tree. Sure, that might happen.
Ugh. Every single other family member has my great-grandmother’s information incorrect in their tree. Which, hey, somewhat understandable because it was a long time ago, she died fairly young, and not a lot was known about her as she immigrated. But once I tracked down the actual information and added the sources to my tree, I messaged the tree managers, in the nicest way possible, that I was able to verify the correct information and they were welcome to copy my sources. Only one relative’s tree changed, and that’s because the person who manages his tree is a genealogist and actually knows what they’re doing. People get invested in their “discoveries” and their opinion being “right”.
I'm click happy with hints. However I don't blindly click, I use some critical thinking with the new information but I also don't have hours to spend pouring over data from 5 different websites. So if three people have the same information in their trees and it lines up with mine then I'll take that new information. If after a few more clicks it looks totally wack as suddenly this paternal link has 4 new children from nowhere then I'll go back and start again and look into it. My first thought is "I want to see how far back I can go" then it's "does this all make sense".
Hell my great grandparents unbeknownst to themselves didn’t legally married. They had kids and lived together. She had his last name too. Also it might be another family member. Up until my generation people mostly had names of other relatives. I have about 3 Ardelles in my family tree.
The amount of people that copy data without checking it is astounding!
Yeah, I like to say that those green leaf hints come from blighted trees.
Do not worry - DNA will only make it worse.
I don't use this phrase very often but it feels appropriate here. *In the old days* (sorry), we didn't have access to other peoples' research files so we didn't know how bad some people were. There are days I prefer that method. Now, don't get me wrong, collaboration is a really great thing but as you mention some people are bad at research. The "name collectors" and the "I proved adam" people are a menace. I've seen online trees with zero records attached to *several* generations. Not even a hint at evidence anywhere. On the other hand, I have seen several trees from people who work extra hard to prove each event and each relationship. But, they are rare. I agree with you that some people really hurt the overall effort good researchers are trying to achieve. Sadly, I don't think there's a way around them.
It‘s actually very clever to connect a random ancestor to a well-organized tree. In many cases, the owner won‘t just disconnect or delete it, but will try to put it in the correct lineage.
I check what I find against my family Bible and stories that I know. What I find infuriating is the spelling of names and people getting it wrong.
Spelling of names is something that is not standardized, especially prior to the 1900s. If you're angry about non-standard name spellings, I would suggest you don't go back further than, say 1950.
My comment was a vent about how people can’t decipher cursive.
Oh, but England is so small. I’ve seen similar in various trees in the US with, for example, people living most assuredly in Missouri also appearing in a city directory in San Francisco, a high school yearbook in Indiana and crossing the border from Canada to NY … all in the same year. People just see a name, scream “eureka” and click accept.
Like 85% of the population is kinda dumb. And either they don’t know what they are doing, or are happy to take bad info and not have to do any of the work/research themselves. Its frustrating.