How Not to Ancestry

I have my tree private for the same reason. I wish ancestry had several additional tools for sorting and marking family members within a tree - the way their search engine works, the best way to find records is to add something to your tree as a hypothetical, set out to prove it, then delete it later if it turns out to be wrong. But in the meantime you have a lot of hypotheticals on your tree. I leave notes to myself like "I'm pretty sure no one knows who this guy's parents are." And "why the heck is this family in Wisconsin?" But I wish there were a way to mark the information you add with "not proven" and then update it.

Great advice "Allie." Ancestry is a great resource, but they have such a lock on documents that they tend to overwhelm every other resource. Finding your ancestors is like detective work. Thankfully, I'm a retired police officer so I learned a lot of techniques in my career that serve me well. First and foremost is to be tenacious. Never give up. I'm a high school history teacher, so a good knowledge of history really helps to put things in perspective with respect to history. For example, someone above speculated on being a Catholic in Europe. That type information is vital to understanding the motivations for what is referred to as "push" and "pull" factors for immigration and can really explain a lot. It allows you to draw supported conclusions about what you find. That is a great difference from "jumping" to conclusions.
 
There are people living in this area who happen to share my last name. They aren't related to me. My people are from the British isles and they are of German descent.

DNA links our family to a James Lambert of Georgia. There are two James Lamberts who happened to have lived within miles of each other. One was a Revolutionary War Captain (George Washington dined at his house) and the other was just a regular guy. People want to believe that Captain James is our relatives and I have to gently tell them no, he wasn't and nudge them in the other direction. Still others create hoops and loops to somehow connect us to Oliver Cromwell's General John Lambert. I have to break the news that no, he had no sons and why on earth would anyone want to be related to him? :wink:

I would assume you're Irish? Got from the Cromwell reference/smackdown. Well done.
 
With my computer skills (huh!) I gave up on ancestry.com. I'm wading through letters, family trees, etc. provided by my sister to find these relatives' place in the CW...:frown:
 
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!

This was a really good idea, Allie, that I tried with my William Montgomery ancestor. I'm taking a tip from Crista Cowan and am going to prove that all the other William Montgomery's in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania couldn't be him. Turning off smart search helps with that a lot as the others all come up and I can check off why they couldn't be him. Then I can try to see if some DNA matches can narrow the search or at least have a search.

One thing I've found with DNA matching is that looking at trees and working with them where you're really sure of the ancestry can give you a greater understanding of what it means when you get to "moderate" levels of confidence and those 5th to 8th gggggreats. Since ancestry.com now has this circle feature for DNA matches, you can get a good idea of where you have matches and how they look in a tree and that sometimes you have ancestor matches but no obvious DNA commonalities. I have a tree that one guy did huge amounts of research and published this book and my circle from that family has 18 people in it--but I only have DNA matches with some of them.

It gives you greater confidence in trying to find other relatives that confirm where some other branch of your tree goes back to. One cousin of my mother did tons of genealogical research and got in contact with some other guy who'd traced the family and wrote him these letters that would say, "There were 2 Nicholas Smiths who came about this time and I think your branch moved to Texas about here." I remember reading these and thinking "Yeah, okay." But the DNA seems to point to the fact that this guy was correct.

My husband has a similar thing where 2 sets of geneaology types disagreed during his aunt's generation and the matches seem to indicate that one of them was on the right track. There are recorded notes of some immense family gathering where the two different groups stood up and said, "No, he didn't come from Maryland, he was from South Carolina." Turns out the Maryland leaning folks may have been correct.
 
This was a really good idea, Allie, that I tried with my William Montgomery ancestor. I'm taking a tip from Crista Cowan and am going to prove that all the other William Montgomery's in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania couldn't be him. Turning off smart search helps with that a lot as the others all come up and I can check off why they couldn't be him. Then I can try to see if some DNA matches can narrow the search or at least have a search.

One thing I've found with DNA matching is that looking at trees and working with them where you're really sure of the ancestry can give you a greater understanding of what it means when you get to "moderate" levels of confidence and those 5th to 8th gggggreats. Since ancestry.com now has this circle feature for DNA matches, you can get a good idea of where you have matches and how they look in a tree and that sometimes you have ancestor matches but no obvious DNA commonalities. I have a tree that one guy did huge amounts of research and published this book and my circle from that family has 18 people in it--but I only have DNA matches with some of them.

It gives you greater confidence in trying to find other relatives that confirm where some other branch of your tree goes back to. One cousin of my mother did tons of genealogical research and got in contact with some other guy who'd traced the family and wrote him these letters that would say, "There were 2 Nicholas Smiths who came about this time and I think your branch moved to Texas about here." I remember reading these and thinking "Yeah, okay." But the DNA seems to point to the fact that this guy was correct.

My husband has a similar thing where 2 sets of geneaology types disagreed during his aunt's generation and the matches seem to indicate that one of them was on the right track. There are recorded notes of some immense family gathering where the two different groups stood up and said, "No, he didn't come from Maryland, he was from South Carolina." Turns out the Maryland leaning folks may have been correct.
We haven't done the DNA thing yet - I think I'm going to get my mom to do it, and then coax my brother into getting one that included the male line thing. Hopefully it can tell us who our Woodsons are, that's my complete wall.
 
I have my tree private for the same reason. I wish ancestry had several additional tools for sorting and marking family members within a tree - the way their search engine works, the best way to find records is to add something to your tree as a hypothetical, set out to prove it, then delete it later if it turns out to be wrong. But in the meantime you have a lot of hypotheticals on your tree. I leave notes to myself like "I'm pretty sure no one knows who this guy's parents are." And "why the heck is this family in Wisconsin?" But I wish there were a way to mark the information you add with "not proven" and then update it.

What I did was to create two trees: one private and the other public. I used the private one as you describe but when I had proved a connection to my satisfaction then that got added to the public tree. Thus, only the "good" stuff is on the public one.

Unfortunately, there are many who will still copy stuff from anywhere and slap it into their tree even if obviously not correct (e.g. the parents died before three of the supposed children were born). I used to send messages to people who copied my folk to their tree in error but rarely got a response and when I did it was often some gibberish or just a statement that they think it's right. You'd think I'd be believed when talking about my grandparents but no. So, proven or not people are going to copy and paste away and likely not pay any attention. It's just another reason one has to be very careful about others' trees (although I have found a number that were very good and even found some long-lost relatives with whom I have shared much). Ancestry can be a sort of tragedy of the commons so to speak.
 
What I did was to create two trees: one private and the other public. I used the private one as you describe but when I had proved a connection to my satisfaction then that got added to the public tree. Thus, only the "good" stuff is on the public one.

Unfortunately, there are many who will still copy stuff from anywhere and slap it into their tree even if obviously not correct (e.g. the parents died before three of the supposed children were born). I used to send messages to people who copied my folk to their tree in error but rarely got a response and when I did it was often some gibberish or just a statement that they think it's right. You'd think I'd be believed when talking about my grandparents but no. So, proven or not people are going to copy and paste away and likely not pay any attention. It's just another reason one has to be very careful about others' trees (although I have found a number that were very good and even found some long-lost relatives with whom I have shared much). Ancestry can be a sort of tragedy of the commons so to speak.
I just finished researching a man who has a lady who has spent years, according to her bio, researching his ancestors - only I found proof she's not related to him. Not even a little. I don't think I'm going to tell her. She's very old and looking at her photo it seems like it would just break her heart.
 
My tree is public simply because I get so many requests from people wanting to know all my information about whatever family line. I put it up there so I can point them to it and tell them that as far as I know everything there is accurate having been checked and double checked by me and a few cousins.

One line I put an * by because its a really strong family tradition with little documentation (it involves an ancestor possibly marrying someone who was a Mayflower descendant). The other family involved (who are Mayflower descendants) accept that the marriage took place and they have it on their trees. People keep asking about it and I tell them its something that has been passed down for literally hundreds of years but the hard documentation is very weak hence the *. All we have is an entry in the diary of a town historian. For me its enough that my relatives knew the Mayflower passengers and actually hung out with them. :wink:
 
My tree is public simply because I get so many requests from people wanting to know all my information about whatever family line. I put it up there so I can point them to it and tell them that as far as I know everything there is accurate having been checked and double checked by me and a few cousins.

One line I put an * by because its a really strong family tradition with little documentation (it involves an ancestor possibly marrying someone who was a Mayflower descendant). The other family involved (who are Mayflower descendants) accept that the marriage took place and they have it on their trees. People keep asking about it and I tell them its something that has been passed down for literally hundreds of years but the hard documentation is very weak hence the *. All we have is an entry in the diary of a town historian. For me its enough that my relatives knew the Mayflower passengers and actually hung out with them. :wink:

I agree with you. When doing genealogy the worst disease to get is "wishful thinking." Those who bend their research to fit a desired result tend to make connections that are tenuous at best into absolute "fact." Heck it would be cool the be a direct descendant of someone really great in history, but most of us are descended from regular people. However, if you study history long enough, you realize that those "regular" people are the ones who really built America. They are the ones who answer the call to duty in America's wars and fight bravely and sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice to preserve our freedom. It would be cool to be descended from someone who arrived on the Mayflower, but I'm proud that my ancestors served with distinction and inspired me to serve as well. Proof, primary sources, hard evidence. Be real.
 
My tree is public and I'm glad it is. I'm not really sure if there is a 'right' way to begin or add to a tree, but it's there in all it's glory, faults and all. I attach people from other trees then go back and begin the process of verifying with documents. If I find something is wrong, I message that user then it's up to them to believe me or ignore me. It's their tree. But at the same time I've had a TON of items copied from my tree to theirs because I do go back and attach any information I can find and cite it. If I'm in error my hope someone will let me know before I get to that point. And two people have. That's why I like Ancestry.com because people can assist each other. It's been helpful to me and by the number of people grabbing items I've found it helps them.
 
When I first joined ancestry, I was in such an information overload I was accepting all kinds of incorrect data. I went back and only accepted data with a source. I am struggling with a grandfather that seems to have come from no where! Someone listed parents for him, who would have been 12 when he was born, and I can not find and source confirming them as parents other than someone's vague memory. I refused to add them to the tree until I can confirm, but I think 12 was a bit young.
 
When I first joined ancestry, I was in such an information overload I was accepting all kinds of incorrect data. I went back and only accepted data with a source. I am struggling with a grandfather that seems to have come from no where! Someone listed parents for him, who would have been 12 when he was born, and I can not find and source confirming them as parents other than someone's vague memory. I refused to add them to the tree until I can confirm, but I think 12 was a bit young.

The same happened to me. I was struggling to find my 3rd G-grandfather for nearly a year. The problem was my Swiss ancestors loved the bible and named their children after people in it. It took a long time to plow through all the same names. You are doing the right thing. Dates have to match. I've run into the very young parents and the ones in their eighties. People making family trees are sometimes lazy. Or they match their family with famous people out of wishful thinking. Documentation is where it's at. Hang in there.
 
Any history without some bibliography or source citations is just entertainment. My own family history project utilizes an application that handled this very well. Other applications caught up with the idea, but many, probably most, family historians are pretty casual about what they use and post online.

I did the bulk of my research before the World Wide Web with snail mail and real libraries with books and microfilm readers. I can do the work of a day in minutes now with digitized records.

I corresponded with one man who claimed an ancestor was Native American. When I asked him to support his conclusion he came up with a name match in the 1700s and "that's enough for me!" But not for me. If I'm not certain about something I say so in my research.
 
Any history without some bibliography or source citations is just entertainment. My own family history project utilizes an application that handled this very well. Other applications caught up with the idea, but many, probably most, family historians are pretty casual about what they use and post online.

I did the bulk of my research before the World Wide Web with snail mail and real libraries with books and microfilm readers. I can do the work of a day in minutes now with digitized records.

I corresponded with one man who claimed an ancestor was Native American. When I asked him to support his conclusion he came up with a name match in the 1700s and "that's enough for me!" But not for me. If I'm not certain about something I say so in my research.
One of my husband's ancestresses at the time of the Civil War, America Laycock, "was said to be Native American." Which is interesting since all eight of her great-grandparents are known, and not one has any trace of Native heritage. I've seen the same thing with someone who was mistakenly marked mulatto in one and only one census, who had two well-known completely white parents. Trees explaining that "he may have been a person of color." Or you know, not. Because life isn't a whacky situation comedy in which God taps an ex-slaveholder on the forehead one day and causes him to temporarily experience life as a minority. People of African ancestry aren't spontaneously generating, they have African ancestors.
 
Any history without some bibliography or source citations is just entertainment. My own family history project utilizes an application that handled this very well. Other applications caught up with the idea, but many, probably most, family historians are pretty casual about what they use and post online.

I did the bulk of my research before the World Wide Web with snail mail and real libraries with books and microfilm readers. I can do the work of a day in minutes now with digitized records.

I corresponded with one man who claimed an ancestor was Native American. When I asked him to support his conclusion he came up with a name match in the 1700s and "that's enough for me!" But not for me. If I'm not certain about something I say so in my research.

I hear you. When I started the web was available but I quickly learned that there's only so much that is available on line and one needs to contact historical societies, professional and religious institutions, libraries of record, sometimes businesses, cemetery offices, schools, etc. to find the hidden gems. On several occasions I hired a researcher to look in places I couldn't access (e.g. L. of VA) and search materials I wouldn't necessarily know about. That paid off every time. I also have quite a collection of things I found by writing and telephoning and, while there were small fees involved, that too paid off. So the old tried and true methods are still in play and, I'd bet, will be for some time to come. Imagine what all those old libraries in the big cities of the original thirteen colonies have that hasn't been digitized and likely won't be (who has the money and time for that ?).

As to my tree on Ancestry, I tagged all their on-line records but I didn't scan every document I have and post such as that would have been way too much time and effort (after all, I know what I've got and it's my tree). However, I often did compose notes ("stories" in their vernacular) explaining things and I always did that if something was questionable. So, there won't always be documentation available on Ancestry even if something is "proven" but I do think that any real researcher will have as much as is available and one can usually see that and use it as some measure of how reliable another person's tree might be.

I also tried to communicate with anybody whose tree seemed rich and who might be related or have info such as mine they might share. I found that most real researchers would answer and be willing to share while the amateurs rarely even answered and, if they did, didn't really have anything intelligent to say. I got in touch with a number of 'lost' cousins that way and that proved to be probably the biggest benefit I got from Ancestry membership.

And regarding sources, the old folks were often just as guilty about repeating a good story without any proof (other than so-and-so said) so one has to be careful about things published in, for example, histories of towns, counties, churches, and such. While often rich sources, they can be just plain wrong too. In a perfect world one needs two or three primary sources that agree to feel pretty certain about a fact.

So that's a very long way to say that I think you are quite right that without sources it's just "entertainment" or, perhaps worse, journalism.
 
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