What to do when you think you might have gone wrong?

OU812

Surred on by my recent discoveries, I now think I may have got the incorrect details for one of my great grandmother's parents.

Based on the location of her in the 1901 census, it's very probably that I've got the incorrect set of parents listed for her. The ones I have come from Wexford, but I'm after finding another woman of the same name & DOB who lived less than a mile from where my great grandfather lived.

In all likelihood, based on other familial relationships (they didn't move far from the parents, lazy sods), I now believe that this is the correct woman.

Deleting the one I have will remove approximately 150 other "family" members - cousins etc who are spread out around the globe & who I spent the better part of a year tracking down...

I know logically I shouldn't think twice about it, but what if I'm wrong ?

pinkypinky

Well, that is a shame. What I would do is take out the other people for now, and keep them in a separate family tree. Begin work on the more likely candidate. If they were less than a mile apart with the same name, there's still a possibility they're related to each other.

I never add anyone until I have satisfied myself proof-wise.

Waitsian

OU812 wrote:

I know logically I shouldn't think twice about it, but what if I'm wrong ?

I can't speak for anyone else but my family tree charts do come with plenty of asterixes! And I will always have a 'maybe' folder. :-)

pedroeibar1

OU812 wrote: »

Deleting the one I have will remove approximately 150 other "family" members - cousins etc who are spread out around the globe & who I spent the better part of a year tracking down...

By moving the 150 individuals from your tree you are not deleting family members, what you would be doing is correctly filing a bunch of possibly related people in a separate tree until you can prove a connection by locating the common ancestor.

After years of looking at trees online I take everything I find on the Web with a very large pinch of salt because there are too many “ancestor collectors” out there shouting about how they are related to Charlemagne and Wilfred the Shaggy.

When I get online “hints” (e.g. on Ancestry’s public trees) I simply use the info as a clue/starting point. I then do the research. If I find several errors early on I dump it; if it is correct I open a new tree for it and keep it separate until I’m happy with the record veracity the people I regard as necessary. Only then would I merge those people.

It is very easy to make a mistake without back-up paperwork. Given Irish naming patterns, the first male is named after the paternal grandfather. That regularly results in near-same-age first cousins having the same name; even if that naming practice is not followed, Christian names are repeated in a family, so it can be hard to differentiate in the same generation or in successive generations if the age gap is not too great. Nor is it unusual to find people remaining in the same locality; we had no big industrial revolution, so populations were quite static in Ireland – a rule of thumb for the probability of mobility is if the extended family was in a location in the late 1800’s it was there at the Famine; if it was there just before the Famine it probably was there back to c 1700.