How Not to Ancestry

I use Ancestry.com and Fold3. I also use 23andme DNA. I have found 947 "cousins."
It is strange how family tradition have crept into fact.
 
Today's lesson in How Not to Ancestry has to do with the magic of smart search.

In theory smart search is a great idea - it tries to prevent you from including records that contradict each other on the same profile. So, for example, if your ancestor John Jones appears in the 1850 Harlan county census, and you add that record to his profile, Ancestry will remove all 1850 census results from your subsequent searches on his name.

This also prevents you from checking your work, and with novice researchers who aren't aware of how this function works, it can lead to the dangerous notion that there is only one John Jones in Harlan county in 1850, so the record you found must be the correct one for your ancestor.

Maybe there are fifty John Joneses to pick from. You just can't see the others anymore.

Never assume there is only one person with your ancestor's name. Even a birthdate is no guarantee - in families with a strong tradition of using a certain name, two cousins born in the same year may end up with identical names living next door to each other. Even unrelated families can end up with identical names and birthdates due to trends in naming. Sometimes it's inexplicable. I recently researched a guy named Cupid Walker. How many Cupids with the last name Walker can you possibly have born around 1820? It turns out, three. At least three. In entirely different states in seemingly unrelated families. Who knew Cupid was such a popular name?

To see that there's more than one, you gotta turn the smart search off.

Critical failure of smart search leads to trees which look awfully good - every step is documented - except that the family does seem to move around a lot, and there's nothing linking the steps. Apparently Tom Whosit lived in Virginia in 1850, then Kansas in 1860, then back in Virginia in 1870. Go Ancestry! It's nice to be able to find people who move around! Except that if you look closely you'll find the guy in Virginia has parents Tom and Mabel, and the guy in Kansas has parents Todd and Jessie. In 1870, Kansas guy was in Kansas, with his name spelled Whosat, and you missed it because safe search hid it from you after you added the mistaken record.

I've been sucked in by a couple of these well-documented looking trees recently, only to have to untangle it later. I could write a whole other post about not getting sucked in by people who look like they know what they're doing!
 
Yeah. Ancestry is a great tool for folks who have experience doing genealogy and know the pitfalls to look out for, but for novices -- like me when I started -- it makes it too easy to be led off to some totally wrong conclusions.
 
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I am seconding Allie's post -- In Andrew and Holt Counties, I've found a BUNCH of William C. Smiths living here in the late 1800's, and one of these William C. Smiths also married a wife named Catherine, just like my g'g'g'grandpa did. Off the top of my head, I can give you particulars about three of the WCS's and some generalities about two of the others.

Even sometimes when you have an uncommon name (not like Smith), you might have cousins with the same name settling in one area -- families liked to travel together and settle in the same area -- and you have to sort those guys out too.
 
I ran into a doozie today - one of the guys I'm researching has three sons who supposedly died in 1864, no sources or location given, just "War for Southern Independence."

Well fine, except that the first son on the list has a service record plainly stating he surrendered at Gainsville, and is alive and kicking with a wife and house servant in the 1870 census, in exactly the same spot he was in 1860! I haven't looked at the others yet. But none of this was hard to find.

I do wish people would be at least a little responsible for the trash they put out there - several other trees have repeated this error.
 
I am one of those rare people who is related to absolutely nobody famous, at least that I am aware of.
Watch out for Ancestry's DNA project, too. Just for curiosity sake - because I have tracked a little over half of my ancestors back to the area where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, some of them back to the 1500s - I sent my swab away. They told me I was nearly 3/4 English, a little Irish, and a smidgen German. I don't buy it. Their database must be really small and unreliable.
 
I am one of those rare people who is related to absolutely nobody famous, at least that I am aware of.
Watch out for Ancestry's DNA project, too. Just for curiosity sake - because I have tracked a little over half of my ancestors back to the area where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, some of them back to the 1500s - I sent my swab away. They told me I was nearly 3/4 English, a little Irish, and a smidgen German. I don't buy it. Their database must be really small and unreliable.
I believe I come from a long line of farmers. My grandfather on my fathers side was born shortly after their family moved from Norway. He married my Grandmother whose father had been born in Germany. My mothers family is German and I'm guessing English? I'm a mutt and it suits me just fine. I think it would be interesting to ferret out my family history but I wouldn't know where to even start.
 
I am seconding Allie's post -- In Andrew and Holt Counties, I've found a BUNCH of William C. Smiths living here in the late 1800's, and one of these William C. Smiths also married a wife named Catherine, just like my g'g'g'grandpa did. Off the top of my head, I can give you particulars about three of the WCS's and some generalities about two of the others.

Even sometimes when you have an uncommon name (not like Smith), you might have cousins with the same name settling in one area -- families liked to travel together and settle in the same area -- and you have to sort those guys out too.

Try William Montgomery's who lived in the South. And they all married women named "Margaret" or "Nancy." There is one who seems to have a story associated with him, as Abraham Lincoln's dad traded at his store in Kentucky. At least that's a unique detail.

BTW, not ALL men who lived in Massachusetts were named William Smith, there were a good many David Bennetts. :smile coffee:
 
I believe I come from a long line of farmers. My grandfather on my fathers side was born shortly after their family moved from Norway. He married my Grandmother whose father had been born in Germany. My mothers family is German and I'm guessing English? I'm a mutt and it suits me just fine. I think it would be interesting to ferret out my family history but I wouldn't know where to even start.
If you don't mind sharing some details, make a thread and post the names of the earliest people you know with rough locations and approximate death and birth dates. No need to post anything from way back or close enough to identify you, your grandparents or great-grands will do fine. I've got a project for the next few days but I enjoy doing lookups.
 
Try William Montgomery's who lived in the South. And they all married women named "Margaret" or "Nancy." There is one who seems to have a story associated with him, as Abraham Lincoln's dad traded at his store in Kentucky. At least that's a unique detail.

BTW, not ALL men who lived in Massachusetts were named William Smith, there were a good many David Bennetts. :smile coffee:
I'm convinced all people from Indiana were named Jesse Fox!
 
Okay, so far of the "sons" who died in 1864 in the "war for Southern Independence" according to that tree - two lived until at least 1870 and had several children after the war, and the third... Is a woman. Named JoAnn. Not Joseph. She lived until 1919, by the way.

I've traced the error back to a pair of trees which reference each other, back and forth, in a recursive loop. Apparently, according to this, no one is responsible for this error, it arose spontaneously, by magic.
 
I am one of those rare people who is related to absolutely nobody famous, at least that I am aware of.
Watch out for Ancestry's DNA project, too. Just for curiosity sake - because I have tracked a little over half of my ancestors back to the area where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, some of them back to the 1500s - I sent my swab away. They told me I was nearly 3/4 English, a little Irish, and a smidgen German. I don't buy it. Their database must be really small and unreliable.
I use 23andme and it has been rather accurate as ID my Native American part and ID the relatives that are on its database.
 
I am one of those rare people who is related to absolutely nobody famous, at least that I am aware of.
Watch out for Ancestry's DNA project, too. Just for curiosity sake - because I have tracked a little over half of my ancestors back to the area where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, some of them back to the 1500s - I sent my swab away. They told me I was nearly 3/4 English, a little Irish, and a smidgen German. I don't buy it. Their database must be really small and unreliable.

I did the test and found it to be fairly consistent with my paper trail with the exception of discovering some South American genes I didn't know I had.
 
I wish I had y'all's skill at this. Some of you have relatives on your tree from the dang Middle Ages and I don't even know how to get further back than my grandparents. :nah disagree:

I have Hoovers in my family, which can be dated back to 1066, fighting William the Bastard. The rest of my families basically start in the States and/or Canada.

The good thing with the Hoovers is that they have a huge cemetery in Ontario, which has some info.
 
Remember, Ancestry has volunteers transcribing documents. I volunteered for it for about 20 minutes. I was doing German land docs from the 19th century. Painful.
 
My dad's family tree is a gigantic mess. A couple of cousins put it together and stuck it on Ancestry.com. They put down all manner of spelling of the family names, assuming that none of the people could read or write and that there were variations of spellings. There wasn't. All Dad's kin were educated and had been for generations, all spelled the family name the same way. The other spellings were other, totally unrelated people. Wrong tribes, wrong locations, wrong everything! :nah disagree: The same cousins did the same thing for Mom's family... :x3:

But your family wasn't the ones writing names down on the census.
 
I am one of those rare people who is related to absolutely nobody famous, at least that I am aware of.
Watch out for Ancestry's DNA project, too. Just for curiosity sake - because I have tracked a little over half of my ancestors back to the area where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, some of them back to the 1500s - I sent my swab away. They told me I was nearly 3/4 English, a little Irish, and a smidgen German. I don't buy it. Their database must be really small and unreliable.

But, all of those cultures intermingled from Pre-Roman times. So that makes a lot of sense actually. I would like to know what they meant by "English", though.

For example, your French ancestors may have went to England in 1066, and stayed there or married English. The Irish went everywhere, likely causing trouble. French, German, and Swiss are likely very similar.
 
Oh, that's true. Usually they got it right, though, maybe leaving out one of the 'l's. What the cousins did was collect every name that sounded even faintly like it might be ours!

What's funny, or sad, or even odd, is that for the 1870 and 1880 census in Niagara county, a cousin was the census taker in the town of Hartland. And they still spelled the names wrong!!
 
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