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I put comments on some of the trees with my sister in, but the problem is that people just click on 'add hint' without even bothering to look at what they are adding. :-(......I just hope one day they will wake up and do some research themselves.
Huia.
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Ancestry used to have a facility to show you what famous relaives you might have. I was supposedly related to Presidents GWB and Nixon :(
Fortunately I found that it relied on someone in the 17th century fathering someone who was born a couple of hundred years earlier.
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Jonesey is absolutely right -- people in the US whose ancestors arrived, presumably from England, before 1800 seem to buy any baloney that Ancestry or anyone else has on offer.
I think Carol was talking about my ancestor back on page 1! He was born in Cornwall in the early 1700s, and married and had kids and died and in fact was the parish clerk there, but managed to have a son with a very different surname in Tennessee. The mind absolutely boggles.
And yes, I started going through the 48 trees at Ancestry that have that nonsense on them, posting a comment asking them to please remove my ancestors from their tree, and why. I got one very nice reply agreeing that a stupid Ancestry hint had been incorrectly accepted, then I lost interest and wandered off.
One other tip for Ancestry -- go to the surname board in question, at the discussion boards, and post a message with a subject line that makes the problem clear -- in my case I said something like
John Smithy 1775 Tennessee NOT son of James Smythe Cornwall
and then when I post comments on the trees with the stupid entries, I give the URL for that message, which explains the whole thing and gives copies of the Cornwall parish records showing that MY John Smythe was born and died in Cornwall, so is NOT their John Smithy of Tennessee.
#$%@ I hate Ancestry and its stupid instant family tree television commercials ...
Oh look! A little leaf on my tree! it MUST be my ancestors!
Yeesh.
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Yes, Janey, I also hate Ancestry, although when my sub for FMP runs out I might take out a 6 month sub to Ancestry, purely for the purpose of being able to see all the trees again and contact people and all the rest of it.
Huia.
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I agree LA Ancestry is a good site when used correctly. I have subscribed since 2005 and wouldn't be without it. I upgraded when Ancestry added LMA's baptisms, marriages and burials...it saved me £s ordering unwanted certs and knocked down that proverbial brick wall.
I purchase credits from FMP when needed.
It is the public/private tree system that is flawed...I received so many hints which were unrelated. Hmmm a bit like the inappropriate Hot Matches we used to receive here : ))))
Linda x
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I think it is a good site (when the records have been transcribed correctly) but I think a lot of people just accept the hints rather than actually looking at what they are.
Hence you end up with cousins giving birth to their parents etc, silly things like that.
I don't think having incorrect people on your tree that you have added though lack of checking, laziness or some other excuse is linked to the country in which you are born and I personally think the use of the term Colonials is disparaging really.
I think if you are the kind of person who investigates and checks facts, you will and if you are not, you won't. Some people are so keen to add people that they never check, I don't think you will ever resolve that.
I also get a lack of responses back from messages sent on Ancestry, not sure why, maybe people aren't used to getting messages like they are on this site.
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hi all
people who just copy another persons tree cant really enjoy doing this hobbie
i love it
the searching bit i really enjoy
lorraine
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I didn't mean to say I hate Ancestry generally -- I've subscribed to it for years and I like its search facilities better than any.
It's its totally profit-oriented approach to this family tree business that makes me insane. It's just like the Living Relatives board here. Ancestry's advertising completely misrepresents the whole concept and process of family history -- you plug your grandparent's name into the search engine, and you find that somebody has put your entire family tree on line, complete with pretty pictures of your ancestors. That's certainly how they advertise it here in Canada -- nothing whatsoever about records and primary sources and databases, all about family trees. Bah.
I know I didn't say anything about colonials. ;)
But I do know that my experience is that USAmericans -- many of whom were doing this before records were available on line, and before searchable databases existed -- are disproportionately negligent.
In my own case alone, I have
- that Cornwall ancestor falsely fathering someone in Tennessee;
- a Cheshire ancestor being the grandSON of someone born 250 years later in the US;
a set of ancestors from Wiltshire who are virtually undoubtedly the source of two by the same surname who settled Martha's Vineyard off Massachusetts (other settlers in the party came from the area in Wiltshire in question, the placenames are from that area, one of the two is shown in records on Martha's Vineyard as born in the village in Wiltshire), but who a load of people in the US insist came from Suffolk, for no reason at all than that two names appear in baptism records there around the same time.
That's a pretty high ratio of utter nonsense -- three completely separate lines of my family tree alone!
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