On Ancestry checking my family tree and others researching your names etc.

I know this member of the family never married. However someone has him married with 3 children. She copied details from my tree ( birth & death) She has even put up census with the "married one and family" and the single one just because the father's name was the same in the single one.) So he was in 2 places at once!!. A photo of me standing alongside a grave in England ( I don't mind that all. It is public tree) Had a look and she has 40,000 plus in her tree. Another person had over 60,000 in their "family"

I don't see any point in getting in touch with the 40,000 plus one to correct her though. She will probably tell me I am wrong. Completely ignored the 60,000 plus one .

Moan for the day.

hymac - 2019-10-06 14:14:00

Know the problem. Too many on-line trees are wrong and too many on-line contributors are right!
Seems that they never cross-check existing information before adding their bits.

amasser - 2019-10-06 16:26:00

The ability to load someone else's information to your tree with a simple click just compounds the problem as more and more trees contain the incorrect information. The reluctance for those that have it wrong to change it doesn't help. There should be a place under each tree for input by others to indicate incorrect information as they see it. It would at least go some way towards making people think about what others think as gospel.

nbrob - 2019-10-07 09:48:00

Dead right!!

hymac - 2019-10-08 09:17:00

You take one error, a wrong father in a document and a huge tree researched, published and shared around many members of the family nearly 70 years ago and today, every member of the family has the wrong George Shotter as their ancestor because legacy, old school research on the hoof was wrong. Jump ahead to now and one family genealogist found the real father, one member knew who it was and hardly anyone knew of it, and then she died. She and I have a dna match but I don't know whether we shared the same bit that now shows her research to be spot on but almost every Ancestry, My Heritage and Geni etc tree out there is blissfiully wrong, and it went wrong decades before the internet or this modern explosion of "where did I come from" was thought of.

Meanwhile, in lots of another parts of Ancestry et al town, my great grandmother was her father's youngest sister. I knew her pioneering immigrant grandmother was a staunch old lady but babies in the bush at 65ish is a real winner.

Edited by morticia at 10:23 am, Tue 8 Oct

morticia - 2019-10-08 10:22:00

A good reason to use WikiTree (https://www.wikitree.com/) or WeRelate
(https://www.werelate.org) both focused on creating a single world family tree with accurate references.

If your family tree is large enough you can use wikitree to see how you are "connected" (includes by marriage) to famous historic people.

Edited by orange_cat at 5:56 pm, Tue 8 Oct

orange_cat - 2019-10-08 17:54:00

I thought I was careful with my research. Took it over to My Heritage last year and got messages about possible mistakes. So it can happen to all of us.

landylass - 2019-10-14 22:17:00

Oi, I was a name-gatherer back in the 1990s. But with good reason.

Got interested in genealogy in 1984, joined the NZSG and the Wellington branch, and wrote everything by hand. In my first year found two large caches of family letters dating from the 1860s onward, so started copying them by hand.

Then to make things easier bought a small electronic typewriter with one-line memory, then a more sophisticated one with 2-page memory, then a $4000 Kaypro 4 plus $1100 dot matrix printer, and later still an IBM AT with Windows 1.

Best of all, I then acquired the marvellous, free, Personal Ancestral File software, and it was so good to only ever type everything once and share it with others.

After getting past the beginner stage with PAF, it dawned on me that for the first time in history, such software could handle all the relations I could find, so I wrote to or visited everyone I could find in NZ and wrote to a few overseas.

Back in them olden days the internet and computer fraud and hacking didn't yet exist, and many people happily shared all their family information, including info about living individuals.

So I did gather a few hundred names, but was unable to personally verify the data about all but the closest cousins and ancestors.

And, of course, I shared anything with anyone who wanted it and some lovely people even donated a little cash toward my expenses. One cousin beat me at getting on the internet and posted lots of my info about his branch at Ancestry.com.

Fast forward to now, all of my parents' generation have gone and my generation of baby-boomers is slowly disappearing too, and I'm glad that computers turned me into a name and history gatherer, because it would again be difficult to do due to privacy concerns.

But the other type of name-gatherer on the internet who collects anybody who "fits" or "has the right name" or "just seems right" has already given me a "new" ancestor and removed another at Family Search. :-( :-(

Edited by dbb at 6:49 am, Tue 15 Oct

dbb - 2019-10-15 06:46:00