Genealogy Chat

florance florance who :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0

sally w

I still reckon I have the wackiest one of all. My oldest sister m to a man who was b 176 yrs before her own father was b. And she had a horde of children before her parents (or even grandparents, or gt grandparents) were born. Quite a lot of the idiot trees have our parents and grandparents and gt grandparents in them with their y.o.b. and yet the tree owners have not noticed that the dates 'do not compute'. Grrr, innumerate idiots.

;-)

If you are given a possible link on a public Ancestry tree - on the Overview page bottom right it lists their sources (BMD, censuses etc) which can be followed up. Often however such a source is described as being another Ancestry tree, which if you follow up all too often doesn't give a further source. But don't damn Ancestry trees en masse, there is a lot of helpful information there and I have been able to fill in a lot of background information and follow up new links

The trouble with the "more is good" approach is that when a tree or a section of a tree has been filched and simply added...is that the inaccuracies in one are multiplied..and a lot of people who do this are not actually that bothered about how accurate the information is........it looks good and therefore it is good.........to be able to show many thousands of "relatives"..........was just looking at another Thread on which there appear to many hundreds of people descended from Eleanor of Aquitaine.......hah bleedin' ha.......maybe, just maybe..one person was clever enough, and lucky enough to research properly and meticulously..a massive task....but only one..the rest have been filched!
I am aware that hundreds of thousands of people ARE descended from mediaeval Royalty..particularly Edward III........but only a minute few can prove it, and they are not common or garden Joe Bloggs like you and I.
Pelo..I am already screwed up..I think i'm descended from Hiawatha..or was it Florence Nightingale??? lol

By the way NOBODY is descended from Florence Nightingale..........

Derek.(HI karen xx yes its me!)

My best one is finding on an Ancestry tree that my grandmother had unexpectedly given birth to a son when she was aged 5 years!. As I'm the only direct descendant who has been alive for over 50 years & the sheer impossibility of the birth (even given the same name in the tree as my grandfather ) I still have been unable to get the perpetrator to change her tree, which is of course, now copied to the U.S. Canada, N.Z, U.K. & Australia.

There is going to be some really screwed up people some day!




:-0 :-0

Hi all

I'm a great believer in "more is good" approach. The more information that is available to researchers the better. With that said however, you MUST always be aware that not all of the data published will be 100% correct and verified. I ALWAYS take the view that what I see on these Public Trees has the possibility of being correct but also has the possibility of being incorrect. I scan these trees in case some-one may have a link to a missing ancestor. Even if they are not 100% correct there might be something in what they have posted that will give me a clue as to where to search next. It is up to me to then do a follow up search and verify this information. In the past I have found people that have eluded me for some-time because of this.

However, there are many, many people out there who take everything they see as the truth and that is how mistakes are propagated throughout the Genealogy community in the World.

David

Jonesey - I have to point out that the UK does not have a centralized system of BMD registration, nor a uniform set of access rules (nor a uniform of marr laws). It's true the UK is more centralized than the USA, but it's really only because the UK is smaller, consisting of 3 jurisdictions, rather than 50+.

The UK model - that BMDs were a concern only of the individual countries - a distinction that was preserved during the Acts of Union, was exported to the individual colonies, and retained by them during their union.

Even when the union of colonies was under the control of the UK parliament, they gave the right to the former colonies, now renamed provinces in Canada and states in Oz. E.g., the British North America Act (effectively Canada's first constitution) gives the provinces exclusive jurisdiction for "Generally all matters of a merely local or private nature in the province" [Sect 92.16]. I presume this held for S Africa too.

Ancestry transcribed someone's occupation as "jam cover" . Had me wondering for a couple of seconds (did she put the lids on jampots?) ........... then I realised she was a tambourer.

duh :-S

Much rather see the original documents and try to decipher them myself.

If the occupation is mis-transcribed, what else is wrong?

I spent most of last evening writing pretty ripsnorting disdain to no less than six people who had filched wholesale large portions of a tree..not mine, belonging to a person i was helping.

Now bearing in mind that all these people had repeated exactly the same mistakes..so none of them could possibly have done their own research..one of them had the grace to apologise, and actually admitted what he had done..and another laid into me.."how dare you ! etc....." claiming that he had in fact done his own research....

you can't win!!

Derek....

I got a tip on ancestry of a match with my great aunt Hannah on someone's tree.


yeah .............. it was a match, because they had taken Hannah and her husband John from my tree!

Hannah and John born Lancashire, married 1902, immediately emigrated to Newark, New Jersey.

........ .... they were looking for Hannah and John, born Lancashire, and emigrated to Newark, new Jersey in 1810!!

They hadn't noticed that my Hannah and John were born 90 years later than their putative children :-D


I sent a message to the tree owner, and posted a message on the tree .......... and he removed them within 3 days.


I didn't get an apology or a message from him, but at least he removed them!




sylvia

I agree there are some glaring errors in Ancestry trees (probably elsewhere too when they get copied over) but sometimes..........! that can turn out to be a bonus.

Recently I discovered my grandmother on an A tree married to the wrong husband, correct birth date and marriage date - wrong death.

On further checking it turned out grandad had used an alias on his WW1 attestation and for a few years after. No idea why?? he had given the correct marriage wife and children details so an odd way to cover any tracks, if that had been the purpose.

If it hadn't been for their wrongly assuming their relative was married to my grandmother I would never have uncovered grandads army records!

I did mail them to point out the error and to say that I was actually grateful for it. not sure if the penny dropped though as they then asked for any further children :-S

You may well be right Potty. Ancestry software does indeed have presumptive text. If you don't fully have your wits about you when entering such a detail as birthplace Boston or Birmingham it will indeed offer several alternatives. It still requires you to either complete the additional location detail or click on one of the places the software suggests however.

I have seen some hilarious howlers. One I recall was an individual's profile that had the individual in the USA in 1860, 1870 and 1880 census records with children born in the USA inter census. The same profile had the individual in England in the 1861, 1871 and 1881 census records with a differently named wife and children born in England inter census, in some cases the children born on both sides of the Atlantic were born in the same year as one another. My ancestor, a cordwainer in England, obviously popped backwards and forwards across the pond to become a labourer in a paper mill in Massachusetts whenever the shoe trade in London went slack. ;-)

I have been helping a distant relative over the last couple of days and finding a tree on Ancestry really did help. Not a very well documented tree but it gave me the clue that solved one problem but I would not dream of copying anything from anybody else's tree that I had not confirmed myself.

As to odd places, I think that at one time when typing in place names on Ancestry trees, the software made certain assumptions, eg type Boston and the software added "Massachusetts"; type Birmingham, and Alabama was added. I know I missed a few of these at the time and was quite surprised that I had one of my Ancestors born in some very exotic location! Maybe that is the reason for some of these odd places?

Good morning..Jonesey..i have to agree with you about the American prevalence of inaccuracy..I deliberately didn't specify the USA in my "rant"..but sadly it is true......they go completely potty about finding a link..however tiny or dubious, to the UK.....My own name is Scottish..and a Scottish heritage, true or false, is insanely attractive to the Americans.....

I think a tree..wherever it may be found, is much more likely to be accurate and genuine, the more detail it contains....like dates of baptism marraige etc..which come from Parish registers....and often personal things like where ones Grandfather died,and of what cause..

I have seen some superb trees..all fully documented...usually unique...and usually with a reasonable number (only) of relatives..
I have very little interst. in fact none, in having a 15th cousin, 64 times removed!!

Thanks for your answers.

Derek.

Having spotted some extraordinary errors within other peoples publicly available trees I can but only agree with Derek. Extreme caution should be exercised and thorough personal research be carried out before accepting what you see as fact.

Via Ancestry's Recent Member Contact facility I am often notified that someone has downloaded a record relating to one of my ancestors. Out of curiosity I usually take a look at their tree. Over the years I have been amazed to discover how many of my ancestors who in the main were born, lived their entire lives and died in the UK, have somehow managed to sneak away from their wives or families in the UK in order to marry and produce children in more exotic parts of the world. Sometimes this has happened even after they had died which takes a bit of doing.

A great deal of these inaccurately reported happenings seem to appear in the trees owned by someone who lives in the USA. This is not a racist slur, as I am usually very pro America. I think that it is most likely due to the fact that unlike in the UK where we have more centralised BMD records, in the USA these records are more fragmented, being held by individual States, each with its own set of access rules.

As has been said by others it is important to judge the information found in others trees by trying to evaluate the dedication of its owner in ensuring the accuracy of its content. There is no hard and fast rule but as a general guide I find that the more people in the tree the more likely it is that the tree contains inaccurate information. Whilst there is no certainty that a tree with even only a few individuals is accurate, be most wary of trees which contain many thousands of individuals as the chance of inaccuracy in those trees is much greater.

I'm afraid that its a case of Caveat Emptor.

I would just like to make a slight technical correction - Ancestry trees have NOT been copied over to Mundia.

Mundia is merely another web portal that Ancestry have which allows those who register to access to Ancestry's public trees. No 'copying' has taken place.

I realize the comparison is not exactly the same but it is similar to the situation on GR where trees entered on to genesreunited.co.uk are visible to members on genesreunited.co.za etc.

Whilst I entirely agree with all the sentiments expressed re doing your own research please do not assume that ALL trees on websites are incorrect either. Many are not and it is a great disservice to those diligent researchers out there to tar them with the same brush as those who are less particular.

The challenge is in knowing which ones are accurate and which are not......!

Derek


could you make an addition to your OP ....... where it will be seen sooner than down here in the body of the thread.


There is another site called Mundia


www.mundia.com

This is operated by ancestry, and ALL Public Trees have been copied over to Mundia.

Mundia is a free site, so it can be seen by anyone who registers. And a lot of people are obtaining their information from that site.




sylvia

I use ancestry trees to give me guidelines ............... and am constantly amazed at how wrong people can get information, and how that wrong information is copied from tree to tree.


Mind you, I do get a feeling of satisfaction when I succeed in proving the tree(s) wrong. :-D


Just had one this evening, a request for help where it was obvious that eldest child could not be the child of the putative mother on the census ...... unless she had married at the age of 15.

FIVE trees had copied the information without seeing the problem!

I manged to find the birth of the first child, on Lancsbmd, which often (but not always) gives the mmn, and which it did in this case. Then I found the marriage ..... and the death of the mother. All occurred within about 18 months, between censuses.

When you looked further ...... child was with paternal grandparents, and father was working elsewhere, a widower.



Personally ................. I have this problem where someone decided I was my brother's daughter. He was married to my mother, and my dad had gone into the biosphere.

The fact that brother was about 30 years younger than his "wife", and only 10 years older than me, had not been noticed by anyone.

THAT was put on a cd, and given out to 100 or more people, some time around 2000. So heaven knows where it all is now!




sylvia

:-D