Genealogy Chat

I'd agree with that; GR flag up on the front page however many million people they've got entered on the site now, ignoring the fact that many are duplicated and quite a few others are the King Kongs, Donald Ducks, Hugh Jarses etc., and with this figure now being roughly equal to the population of Britain, some people infer that it's almost certain they'll find a link immediately, especially since if they click on the message boards the first thing they see is the GR propaganda of people saying how wonderful it is that they've just discovered entire families whom they hadn't seen for 73 years. While of course it's a good thing that some people have such stories to tell, lumping them all together and shouting them from the rooftops creates a misleading impression, conveniently ignoring the large numbers of people who either don't get anywhere at all, or build up a sizeable tree entirely through their own efforts but still never manage to find a link. They ought to have a disclaimer somewhere, 'Warning: if you're serious about researching your family tree, it will require a lot of time, effort and money on your part, and although joining this site may help to some extent, it certainly won't get all the hard work done for you.' I wonder if anyone's researching an Allingham family tree; if so and they happen to be the right Allinghams, they ought to get a goldmine of information before they've even started checking online records or ROs, by what every book on FH research tells you should be the first step. At 109, Henry Allingham is Britain's oldest resident, and is thought to be the last surviving veteran of the Battle of Jutland, as well as being one of very few people recorded on the 1901 census and still around. He must have some amazing stories to tell.

I had a definate hot match last week, so sent an email and opened up my tree but didn't hear anything back. A few days later I put my name into the search box and some unknown person had my entire living family in her tree and it turned out to be her. I emailed her again and received a reply that she HAD been going to reply to me but she'd been too busy (what...too busy but she'd had the time to put my family on her tree!) and that she WAS related. She is my great grandfather's sister's husband's second cousin's husband's brother's granddaughter. Neither of us is related to the 2nd cousin in the middle of that! I won't open my tree next time I send an email on a hot match.

April I never NEVER open my tree to anyone.Should there prove to be a link (and that hasnt happened yet, despite the 100s of Hot Match enquiries) then I feed out the information I wish them to have. Most of my tree will be completely irrelevant to someone who is connected to me through our mutual 7 x GGPs. And anyway, there are several glaring errors on my tree, which I dont have the time and strength to correct. Olde Crone