My friend has this and it is feeding her grandiose ideas and takes all the matches literally, she now thinks she is related to all sorts of Scottish and Irish royalty. King David of the Jews through his sister being buried at Tara, and even a Woolly Mammoth. I showed her the error of her ways with King David and that we all had a dna split from mammoths (not sure she believes that one).

I want to explain to her that she needs a paper trail and that gedmatch only goes back 6 or 7 generations with accuracy. How do I prove this to her?

As an aside I find this a danger for people researching history that fools out here are putting up family trees that are flights of fancy. Have any of you come across others like this?

arielbooks - 2020-01-13 07:21:00

Of course they are out there and some people have long and recognised paper trails to go with them, but most don't and the gullible will choose to stay gullible despite the best efforts of those who will try to tell them otherwise, and if they do they aren't actually hurting anyone inside their belief.

Those with a genuine interest will educate themselves and learn to do it well, and the name collectors will ignore best practice, logic and rationale and continue to post unvalidated garbage as accurate. Often, they will even get it right because they copied someone's documented tree, but accurate or not, what they do provide is a starting point for proper research to include or exclude a specific record, not an end point in itself.

When it comes to our DNA matching Tree, the most recent generations are based on the matches tree, and are unvalidated by me because I'm not doing their research for them. If there is a definite link, I research that to validate it and then it goes in the private tree where all the documents live. The tree description notes this is not necessarily validated and those using it should do their own research. Everyone should, no matter where they find their info.

Gedmatch has nothing to do with silly, undocumented collector Trees as found on Ancestry and My Heritage.

Edited by morticia at 12:31 pm, Mon 13 Jan

morticia - 2020-01-13 12:24:00

She may be related to Anybody but so could a million others and to a very small degree. Most people are somebodies, as were most of their ancestors, so it's pointless trying to prove otherwise.
Still, she can dream.

amasser - 2020-01-13 16:58:00

Thanks for your replies, and yes I get that she probably doesn't want to hear. I was just hoping that there was an explanation that I could give her why how she is going about this is foolish.

arielbooks - 2020-01-14 07:45:00