General Chat

I came across a tree today on another site which listed my grandfather.

I had a look and the information is incomplete as is the number of his children (my father is missing for a start).

Checked how many names in this tree........94,501

*sighs*

I found a tree on another site with my paternal grandma on and the tree owner has my grandma born in the U.S.A. Correct birthdate but a long way from Lancashire.

I think we have all come across these so-called "researchers".

My best one was someone who contacted me for information. She had a public tree on Ancestry so I took a look and it was pretty big and most of it copied from other trees I think. I found that she had my deceased uncle married to the wrong woman so I gave her the correct information but warned her that my uncle's wife was still alive.

She insisted that she had the right wife because she had found the marriage on freebmd. What she had found was a man with the same very common name who had married in the same town uncle moved to late in life. Because she had found uncle's death in this town she assumed he had lived there all his life. She got very huffy when I said I had known this man and his wife all my life, had been at their wedding, aged 4, and had photos to prove it. At that point she decided to add auntie (who was still alive and should have been kept private) as a second wife. So uncle now appears on her tree as a bigamist!! Needless to say all those number crunchers out there have copied the data straight on to their trees as well.


*sighs" with supercrutch

The hints leaf on Ancestry doesn't seem to help. I think it allows you to 'drop in' information from other trees.
I have family members on someones tree f rom this and they have always refused to delete it because it ' just dropped in'. To make matters worse part of it is incorrect and the more that error is repeated the more 'correct' it becomes on that One World Tree.

If I spot an error and find the tree is huge I don't even bother sending a message just add a comment - problem is now that Ancestry has changed its tree it is not easy to spot that a comment has been made.

I have no idea what the attraction is. I want to know the ins and outs of every person in my tree (and everyone else's) lol.

I still appear as my Aunt's daughter on some trees despite telling them she had one child..a son.

Yes, I was seen at my Aunt's house a lot, she shared some of my care after my Mother died. So that must have spread from just one or two people who remember the late 1950s.

aaaargh!!!

I know what you mean.

I just corrected a guy that had my great uncle married at age 18. Said he got the fact from the other trees. Well Bert never married but there is a man with the same name that did get married, so now he has me wondering if Bert did get married, and then something happened and that is the reason he went to live with my dad (dad was aged 4).

if I spend my money and it is the wrong guy I would of wasted my money and acquired another wrong certificate

ARRRGGHHHH and sigh :-D

Certificates are expensive enough even when ordering direct.

I have a lot of people 'parked' because I have the gut feeling they are linked somehow but until I see evidence they aren't included..lolol they are just wandering around in the ether :-D

I would rather have less people and more meat on the bones
:-D :-D :-D

Me too Joy :-D

you saying you were a boy once Sue :-S

Seems so lolol

There's a tree out there somewhere with my husband being married to his sister, and his brother in law as a son of the family, even though his surname is different.... I'm not on it. hahaha

There's a single tree out there which has my great grandparents and their children on it 4 times.!

Each time their correct profiles have been used.
Their DOBs and marriage have been included yet they have been allocated with 4 completely different sets of parents on each entry... ALL incorrect.

Some plonker in the US is determined to make my great grandmother part of their own family from Illinois!
She was born in Scotland to second generation Irish parents who never left Scotland and had no connections there.

Square peg and round hole.
My great grandmother will never fit in this tree no matter how hard the owner tries

Annoying, upsetting and you wonder if these tree owners know the meaning of research.

We can all make mistakes and usually pick them up when double or triple checking. Just to randomly add people because they share the same name (or even first initial) to bolster their tree numbers is beyond all reason.

As we have all said, these badly researched trees then get shared and the errors are never addressed.

My Richard Lightfoot is a prime example. Each eldest son was named Richard as was the eldest son of Richard Snr's younger brothers (makes 1st cousins a nightmare). Yes I know they had absolutely no imagination, a middle name would have helped, Just sticking any Richard Lightfoot into your tree doesn't work! Name collectors then proceed to add any of the possible wives which is when I click off.

Sue (who has head banged the wall a few times).

Many years ago I had a woman asking me to open my
private tree on Ancestry as she was looking into the Nerrlie
family especially A Nerrlie, unknown to her this was my mother.

I asked her what the connection was between her and the Nerrlie's
specifically A Nerrlie.
I'm still waiting for her reply.

Did look into her tree which held my mother's name and wrong info
about her and no way related that I could see.

I have a deliberate mistake in my tree
Its only a slight one
I did it so i can see who has copied my work ;-) ;-)

I once put someone right on the details he had for my great great grandfather who was born with a different surname to the one he was brought up as. I had his death certificate and his will which verified what I thought was right.

This persons response was 'I think we all have to guess sometimes or we would never get back any further?' I didn't bother to explain that he was getting back further with a family that had no relation to him whatsoever

lolol nothing like accuracy is there?

I wish a £500 would drop into my bank account so I could buy some much needed but not crucial certs to enable me to identify the rest of my Jones and Bateman Welsh line.

Why oh why did I get lumbered with Jones?

I know how you feel Sue as I got Smith!

Just thought I would check up on the tree that had my uncle as an apparent bigamist to see if the tree owner had corrected anything yet. Of course she hasn't and I have discovered that she has made a right mess of my great grandfather. He apparently fathered a child at the age of 14, and she knows this as the child is with him in a later census and she has found the birth registration. Er, no.....g.grandfather married a lady who had already had an illegitimate child who was registered and baptised with his mother's surname and a different Christian name to the one he was later known as.

G.grandaddy disappears after about 1880 but our number crunching friend knows where he is. He's in the workhouse in 1881 and dies in 1892. Again she has just picked on someone with the same common name, in roughly the right area, and decided that he is g.grandfather. It took my knowledge of a family "story", plus years of on-off research and a bit of lateral thinking to find him and it was a real Eureka moment when I did. When his brother-in-law died g.grandad left his family and moved in with bil's wife and children and lived under bil's name. Some years later he went back to his own name which was then used by dead bil's family as well.

If I tell someone that they are wrong I try to be courteous and friendly and give them all my evidence but it really annoys me when people make any old name fit the facts so that they can keep adding to their tree and brag that they have added another three thousand people this week!

Rant over

:-D :-D

Some "researchers" will copy anything that they find and don't even consider the stupidity

My relative in died in 1863.
A plonker of a name collector noted his address on the 1861 census, then found a photo of a very pretty house in "this street" on an estate agents website
He copied the photo and added it to his tree stating that it was typical of the house in which my relative raised his children.

The photo can now be found on multiple trees using the same info

The house in the photo dates from 1920-1930

Every one of my relatives children had already died of old age, before this house was built !