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  1. #1
    Brick wall demolition expert!
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    Default On line tree hints

    Ever wondered how these pop up from nowhere?

    Well I may have solved a tiny bit of the puzzle today......

    Without going into huge details suffice to say that I have in recent weeks become intrigued by a particular lady, her exploits and her family and theirs. I didn't and indeed don't know much about her husband so whilst ferreting around doing some basic research I noticed that there are a number of online trees that attribute certain activities to him. My initial thought was how do they know that so I did a bit of research elsewhere and I believe that they have confused two individuals.

    So anyway I decided I would create a little online tree as a repository of the information that I have and had got as far as entering her name and his name and the date and place of their marriage but nothing else before I was hit with a varitable tsunami of hints which can only have come from these other family trees as they include their children, and the various locations that they ended up in across the globe.

    I can see how easily people could be seduced into click click clicking on these without thinking each one through!

  2. #2

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    Quote Originally Posted by Megan Roberts View Post
    I can see how easily people could be seduced into click click clicking on these without thinking each one through!
    I am sure I have been guilty of just that - and you end up with duplicates and things that you later find out to be wrong. But fortunately you can correct them!

    But when you find things you know to be wrong on other people's trees? Either you have documentary evidence or it's close enough family for you to know? What then? The existence of such errors can propagate in exactly the manner you describe. Short of contacting everyone who's trees contain false information, what can be done!?

  3. #3
    Loves to help with queries
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    Because I'm a curious lass, I love to have a good look at new information and it really irritates me when I see glaring errors....it shouldn't and it's certainly not good for my blood pressure.! :-)
    My family tree was public years ago and several distant cousins copied it....that was OK with me. But, maybe because they hadn't found my sources themselves, they didn't really look at them and started adding incorrect parent names for great grandparents, then great great grandparents. I told one cousin to look at a marriage record that he had for his grandmother Mary Ann daughter of James but he decided his grandmother was Mary Ellen daughter of Richard...didn't get anywhere with that and now 9 other trees have this incorrect line and those 'hints' will pop up for others.

  4. #4
    Brick wall demolition expert!
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    Quote Originally Posted by CraigRushforth View Post
    Short of contacting everyone who's trees contain false information, what can be done!?
    Unfortunately the answer is nothing.

    We have to make our own choices. And we should do that with the best information available to us.

    Some decide to make their trees private, others like myself are happy to make them public, even if that means that people take the information and abuse it.

    I have given up telling people that they are ******.

    I rely on those who are serious about family history, as opposed to being name collectors, finding my tree and realising that I am right and the others are wrong - after all how can William be my great great grandfather when he died 14 months before my great grandfather John was born, and the death and birth certificates are for all to see. But there are those who think that they know something about the gestation period of women in the 1840s that had never been discovered previously, even when its pointed out to them.............

    And after that relax with a glass of wine!

  5. #5
    Knowledgeable and helpful
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    Quote Originally Posted by CraigRushforth View Post
    But when you find things you know to be wrong on other people's trees? Either you have documentary evidence or it's close enough family for you to know? What then? The existence of such errors can propagate in exactly the manner you describe. Short of contacting everyone who's trees contain false information, what can be done!?
    Whatever you do, don't mention it on forums like this. The people who have your relatives wrong in their trees will pile on to you and accuse you of wasting time ranting, as they did a while ago with me.

    They were unpleasant, which wasn't necessary.

    The correct info is so easy to find, but the wrong stuff is handed to them on a plate (or a leaf?) It really isn't worth bothering with them. They're happy with incorrect unsourced info, but you know your own tree's fine.

  6. #6
    Super Moderator - Completely bonkers and will never change.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Squaredancer View Post
    Whatever you do, don't mention it on forums like this. The people who have your relatives wrong in their trees will pile on to you and accuse you of wasting time ranting, as they did a while ago with me.

    They were unpleasant, which wasn't necessary.

    The correct info is so easy to find, but the wrong stuff is handed to them on a plate (or a leaf?) It really isn't worth bothering with them. They're happy with incorrect unsourced info, but you know your own tree's fine.
    Oh Squaredancer, I hope you're not putting BG and its members into the 'genealogy forums in general' mix.

    I like to think that even when we find that people are climbing completely the wrong tree we're kind enough to say 'think you might have got that wrong' and then say why.

    I will admit that our regular contributors are the first to caution about believing everything you find in other peoples' family trees, but that's slightly different to ranting because information they have doesn't agree with information you have.

    Meanwhile, even though I don't have even a sprig of a tree on Ancestry they persist in sending me hints that I'm related to Boadicea/Boudicca (however you want to spell it). I may well be, but I doubt that I'll find proof in any written records.

    Pam
    Vulcan XH558 - “Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”

  7. #7
    Knowledgeable and helpful stepives's Avatar
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    I have several online trees, and collectively there are about 51,500+ hints on 2 of them, I haven't bothered deleting or looking at them as over the years they hardly bear no common factors with my tree or trees.

    I hate to imagine how many there are in my other online trees I have. One day I might add them up and have a laugh at them.

    It seems over the last few months they are mostly from America, and no idea why that would be, so they go together with the other rubbish. A few years ago I was inundated with Essex hints, which I have no connection with at all.

    Steve.
    Too many bones, too much sorrow, but until I am dead, there's always tomorrow.

  8. #8
    Famous for offering help & advice
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    have to say on the whole I have found the hints provided quite useful. They are there for me to accept or reject as I like, and of course my research has generated hints for other people.

  9. #9

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    When I was new to Ancestry I was plugging in those hints/suggested parents and went down a whole wrong branch. I spent ages on it, and telling my mum all fascinating stories that ultimately proved to be another family!

    I learnt my lesson quite quickly. I am judicious now, and that paid off when I had a key family member where I felt all the existing trees were suspect. I couldn't find a core piece of info that justified their claims. I bought a certificate and was right; there's about seven trees all wrong.

    It becomes a bit of an echo chamber in there. But also I think there's not much interest in sites like Ancestry to really fix this. All they want is for you go in, for it to feel nice and easy, click some buttons and see wonderful tress sprout up. So many people will never be any the wiser they got it wrong, and in in actuality for most people it doesn't matter. It's just a feeling of completion, and Ancestry won't want to interfere in that feel good Netflix-style easyness click click and complete.

    There should be a way to set a flag - so people can see "Someone has disputed X fact" to at least start to address the echo chamber.

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