Comments that are maddening (or be careful with online trees).

pedroeibar1

Most - if not all - of us have at some time accessed family trees on Ancestry / FamilySearch / MyHeritage, etc. Periodically a tree will turn up with the name and some detail of an elusive ancestor, one known about but proof of where exactly the connection lies remains a mystery. This leads to an email and if lucky a response, most of them disappointing and/or plain daft. I’ve now started a collection, some of which includes

• Question – I’ve been searching for the parents of ‘Brisbane Mary’ for ages and note that you have them as Irish, Michael born in Leitrim and Anne in Roscommon. I'd be very grateful if you could share any source material for this. Response - Sorry it took so long to respond. I received my information through Ancestry Hints as possible relatives.
• Question - Thanks for giving me access to your tree. Response - Some things to note - some of the named siblings in the generation with James and his father are speculative, based on baptismal sponsors names.
  
• Question - Are you sure that this is the correct baptism/family? Response - No, I got it from another tree, I find trying to read the parish records can be really tedious.
• Question - Are you sure X & Y are brothers and not cousins? Response - Given that my family had the mass card and that the deceased was living in the same townland and only a year older, they must be brothers.
• Question - I see you have X as a son of Y, are you sure of this? Response - I put him there but you should know it is very difficult to know how to fit the individuals into the tree without census records or better marriage records.
• Question - I see you have two brothers (alive) with the same forename; that’s unusual but not impossible. I’ve not been able to locate an appropriate baptism – where did you find it? Response I did place XX with the 'wrong' family deliberately because without placing him he would have been impossible to locate. He must be related one or two generations away anyway.
• Question – I see you have four sons in that family; I was unaware that there were another three and another two sisters. Response - My info is a little speculative - I know my great-grandfathers name and one brother - and there is no one left to confirm any info (to my knowledge). Bear with me as I try and verify everything over time.

Feel free to add your own favourites

pinkypinky

I think it's terrible when people don't reply at all. Someone shows as a second cousin on my Ancestry DNA results - tree private. I've sent 2 messages but no response, and I can see that she has logged in.

Another person who had a lot of detail on one branch did reply but with a very vague "oh I need to look up my records" and no further response.

Hermy

After pointing out some issues regarding someone else's tree I was told that while it may not be correct today it will be correct over time as all the pieces fit together. In view of this observation I no longer carry out research and instead just sit back and wait for time to do it for me!!!

RGM

I was once contacted by someone who was eager to share a mass card for someone in my tree. I was of course interested, but wanted to know how she knew it was the right person. It turned out she just saw it was "Mary McFadden from Donegal" and assumed. Sure that's a fairly rare Donegal name now, must be a match...

She was very persistent and I ended up having to be a bit blunt/rude with her.

Jellybaby1

Ah, this is the FUN thread! Loving it already. I don't have anything major to report except one person who put her family history online. She has two pieces of information wrong. I sent her copies of the records I had confirming that I am right, but she hasn't corrected her blog even after four years! I gave up contacting her.

tabbey

You really need to do your own research using primary sources.

Most of what is put up on ancestry.com is bunkum, even if some is accurate, you need to check everything to be sure.

Genuine researchers want the truth, ancestor collectors can't handle the truth, ignore them.

pinkypinky

I think that might be a tiny bit harsh, Tabbey. I think a lot of people just aren't as meticulous as we'd like and many more don't understand Irish records well enough to know that there might be multiple people with the same name in the same area.

tabbey

pinkypinky wrote: »

I think that might be a tiny bit harsh, Tabbey. I think a lot of people just aren't as meticulous as we'd like and many more don't understand Irish records well enough to know that there might be multiple people with the same name in the same area.

Maybe, but even when you tell them the truth, they don't want to know.

Alicat

tabbey wrote: »

Maybe, but even when you tell them the truth, they don't want to know.

That's the worst bit. I would be guilty of having a few (very few) speculative bits on my tree, which is on Ancestry, but I know it's speculative and I put it there to remind me about something. If someone gets in touch with certs or documentation, I'm delighted for the information and quite happy to bow down to superior knowledge.

There is a distant relative that has a family tree on a website he built, and it's wrong. I know it's wrong because I found the documentation to back it up. He has chosen not to respond to any of my polite queries and I have seen countless relatives who have taken his info as gospel and have copied and pasted on trees all over the place.

There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but refusing to believe it is the worst!

pedroeibar1

Alicat wrote: »

..............There is a distant relative that has a family tree on a website he built, and it's wrong. I know it's wrong because I found the documentation to back it up. He has chosen not to respond to any of my polite queries and I have seen countless relatives who have taken his info as gospel and have copied and pasted on trees all over the place.

There's nothing wrong with being wrong, but refusing to believe it is the worst!

Been there also – there is a US-based website dedicated to a ‘Clan’ that intermarried with my lot in the early to mid-1800’s. Several of the entries are based on personal emails that I sent to a distant relative 20+ years ago when we were speculating on a few relationships. He then (innocently) passed copies to the site owner who took them as ‘fact’ and published them with an attribution to me as the source. (That really annoys me as he has ignored requests to take them down!)

Another annoying one is the Limerick City website that has published a .pdf document of notes on my family which contains several errors - they and the writer have ignored my contacts.

The most annoying (because I was duped) derives from presenting a Washington DC genealogist c 2000 with a huge amount of my research in the expectation that he might help with my 2 ‘missing’ generations in the 1700’s. He was to share the results but then said his client was not willing to pass on the info, and as she had paid him it was impossible. (I’m not missing much I think, I saw a few of his early emails to her and they were rubbish.)

The prize (to date) for the most stupidly hilarious information on the web for my family is from a woman who has concocted a fairy-tale story in which she originates my family in Scotland and has them fleeing from the Campbells 1602 and settling in ………South Africa! (White settlement of South Africa began in 1652, when the Dutch East India Company established a station at Cape Town).

To paraphrase Beckett - I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell, an execrable bunch!

pinkypinky

For these sort of reasons, I only put partial info up on Ancestry. Once I've chatted to someone, I might then share a screenshoot or pdf version of a pedigree, without all my back-up sources. However, this doesn't stop people putting that info back online, as I discovered when I got a bit of shock at a hint for my not that long deceased father only to find him in another tree belonging to someone I have made contact with.

pedroeibar1

pinkypinky wrote: »

For these sort of reasons, I only put partial info up on Ancestry..

That's one of the issues now to be considered when becoming part of the the FamilyTreeDna and Ancestry projects - trees have to be public for the research to work properly. At least on Ancestry there is an option to 'lock' or keep private one's tree, but the matches still show.

L1011

There's an old family tree maker tree export on someones website - so old it just lists members. I'm on it. I don't think I'm related to him.

He's also dead, so I'm never getting an answer on why I'm there.

I found a post by him on a forum where he'd conflated a couple dying on the same day (morning and evening, family story about him not being able to live without her etc etc) with a local disaster 10 years earlier and stating outright they died in it. So I suspect his research 'standards' were very poor.

Jellybaby1

Well, I suppose allowances have to be made for people who are inexperienced at researching. Still, it's aggravating to be ignored when I know I have all the evidence in my possession.

Yogaqueen

Some of the replies are hilarious. I was using ancestry and found my Mothers first cousin also on Ancestry. I gave her a load of information of my Mothers Grandparents, except pictures. Later I found she entered all this info but then had found other matches whom she copied their tree also, and was claiming these where the Grandparents.
She was completely wrong. The photos she uploaded where of strangers and she claimed that the Grandmother died and 2 years later the Grandfather re-married, and having more children. The real Grandmother died about 40 years later than she states.

srmf5

I haven't come across anything too appalling over the years as far as I can remember. I know that I was in contact with someone recently who claimed that her ancestor emigrated during the Great Potato Famine and was in steerage. However, the ancestor was born in the late 1860s. The same person asked me to help find the parents of another ancestor. This confused me since she already had the names of the ancestor's parents. It turned out that she added them as parents because the person had a leaf hint or whatever it's called. She was also shocked that I could help with another ancestor because the person had no leaf hints. In fairness to this person she changed all of the information to what I gave her but this person had been researching for years. There have been messy trees where a child was born after the mother died. It's just a matter of using your common sense in a lot of cases.