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General => Ancestral Family Tree DNA Testing => Topic started by: LizzieL on Sunday 15 January 23 13:44 GMT (UK)
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I have a DNA match of 7cM with C. Ancestry tells me that C and I are half 5th cousins once removed, and that our common ancestor is my 4 x great grandfather Thomas Child. Looking at the relationship tree on Ancestry, it has my 3 x great grandmother (Esther Child) as the half sister of C's 4 x great grandfather (William Attfield).
Six Ancestry members trees are cited as source for Thomas Child being William Attfield's father. One is a private tree, but if I look at the other 5, none of them say that WA is TC's son.
They all say that WA is the son of Thomas Attfield and Elizabeth Rampton.
So how has Ancestry invented this relationship?
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They use any trees that are in any way plausible. If they don't fit your tree after researching, ignore them.
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But the five trees aren't anything like plausible. The only thing that matches is that both my ancestor (Esther Child) and C's ancestor, had parents called Thomas and Elizabeth and were born in Surrey (different towns) in the 1740's. Only one of the five trees have anyone with the surname Child, but they are from York and not directly connected to their Attfield line. I have no Attfields in my tree.
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Their plausible is not our plausible, Lizzie :-X
Add - I did say 'in any way' and you seem to have identified it!
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But the five trees aren't anything like plausible.
That sounds like many Ancestry trees. If any of the trees are identical, they've probably been copied wholesale with no checking or any research. But Thrulines has no way of knowing what is plausible and what isn't. It just attempts to recognise individuals in different trees who may be the same person, and extrapolate their tree lines to create a possible link between you and a DNA match. Thrulines are hints, not facts. If, on investigation, you discount it, move on ;)
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Ancestry trees are definitely to be taken with a pinch of salt. I sometimes look at them, but validate anything plausible with my own in depth research. Most of time this disproves them. For example, for one of my brick walls there are several identical trees which have a mother who was born over 20 years after her son's baptism...
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The Common Ancestor route between you and your match can be all over the place it is “Cobbled Together” via multiple Ancestry Family Trees, and we know how good those can be.
Every werk I check ours and my Wife has a new cM match via Common Ancestor the trouble is the James A who Ancestry says is the Common Ancestor his daughter Betty leads to my Wife does not fit in the shared matches line.
The shared matches line has the one below James A called Elizabeth and in the tree that Ancestry has used Elizabeth’s has Father is Joshua D, and in this tree has the documents to show her Baptism plus she was born 16 years after Betty in a different Town and her marriage lists Joshua as Father.
As it is James A is the Common Ancestor to three other DNA matches that we research and have linked to in my Wife’s tree so we are sure her tree is correct.
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Indeed many Ancestry trees are questionable. Some have 12 year old brides having children soon after marriage!
This week I was filling out some details of one line of 5th cousins and found many trees intermingling details of two William Moorcrafts from Kent, born in 1823 and 1829, marrying two different Mary Anns. Some had all children of the two couples assigned to one set of parents while many had the earlier birth date, and village, for the younger William despite all evidence to the contrary from the various census!
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This week I was filling out some details of one line of 5th cousins and found many trees intermingling details of two William Moorcrafts from Kent, born in 1823 and 1829, marrying two different Mary Anns.
But at least you can see the connection and sort out the two families. I have an ancestor, William Carr, who married a Sarah, his brother Thomas also married a Sarah. The two couples had children over the same time period in the same village. They duplicated many of the names of their children. I have a lot of thrulines which show descent from my Sarah (and William), but are really from Thomas and Sarah. Easy to see where the mistake lies and sort out the real relationship with the DNA match.
Another common problem is trees muddling the father of my 3 x great grandmother with her much older brother, which also gives a relationship one generation out to my DNA match. Again the match is associated with the right line but not quite correct.
But the connection between William Attfield and Thomas Child really stumps me, especially as none of the trees given of sources have this erroneous relationship.
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I see dozens of trees that take several of my branches one step further back than I have ever got, but not a single one has a citation for any of them. I just wish I could find the tree that everyone else copied, in the first place.
Mrs Zaph
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Sounds like more time can be spent sorting out other people’s wrong trees than doing one’s own research. :)
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Sounds like more time can be spent sorting out other people’s wrong trees than doing one’s own research. :)
Ruskie,
It's a fact!
I've lost count of the errors I've found but the most annoying thing is, when wrong parents are added yet the info. is on baptisms/births/marriages & often deaths, if they'd only spend the necessary £s on vital records rather than guessing & getting it wrong ::)
I helped a woman a while back who had my relative in her tree, his siblings, parents, g/parents etc. all copied from my tree but...
The most compelling thing was, when I searched her tree, she had this chaps MC attached which clearly showed his parents names & neither matched the parents in my family tree ???
I sent her a message to point out her error, explained she had his MC with his correct parents named yet 6 months later the tree was still with the wrong parents!!!
I'll need to check if it's since been changed :-\
Annie
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Sounds like more time can be spent sorting out other people’s wrong trees than doing one’s own research. :)
It's not so much sorting out other people's trees, I don't care if they perhaps have wrong information and I'm certainly not going to attempt to correct them. But when researching my own tree and finding assertions of a fact or facts that I haven't personally found, in numerous other trees, it compels me to trawl through them all attempting to find the source of that information. Invariable they are all unsourced and it becomes apparent that they are all copies of each other, but it doesn't explain where the information has come from.
Sometimes it becomes clear when I discover matching information, but realise that it can't apply to the person alleged. Often, it just hangs around with no source to be found, and I spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to research something that I know could well be wrong, but which I am compelled to look into, in case I genuinely have missed something ???
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Latest Thruline oddity.
Wife has an xGreat Aunt in her tree and she had three children each of them leads to a DNA match and the links to each match has been proven by citations etc.
The latest Thrulines goes from the xGreat Aunt via a different child to my Wife’s new DNA match.
Problem was the xGreat Aunt was born, lived and died in England.
The Thrulines hint lady had the same name, was born about the same time but lived and died all her life in the USA.
I am sure Ancestry is dumbing down its systems
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I am sure Ancestry is dumbing down its systems
I couldn't agree more & probably in an effort to get more people to buy a sub. while causing unnecessary confusion along the way.
Annie
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Rosinish's point on certificates is valid.
While looking at my wife's DNA connections I noticed discrepancies in the cMs for certain descendants of her great grandmother's family. Until then I had believed the records that I had seen (1891 census and 1906 marriage certificate) showing her to be the daughter of Frederick Frampton, as had all the trees online, born in 1887 7 years after the last child. It was only the purchase of the birth certificate showing her to be the daughter of her 20 year old unmarried "sister" which revealed the truth. Her mother marrried within a year and had another 12 children
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I agree to a point. Every tree I have seen on Ancestry containing a particular branch of my family is completely wrong. Obtaining the marriage certificate for the father and a handful of birth certificates for his children would have made the mistakes glaringly obvious, as they contain the father's middle name, which is not present in any census or baptism records and resulted in a different man with the same first and last names taking his place in those trees and his ancestral line being totally incorrect as a result.
On the other hand, I have a half-cousin who only found in later life that the woman who he believed to be his elder sister was his mother, and his parents (as he had believed) were his grandparents. But his birth certificate showed his grandparents to be his parents, as his grandmother had also been the informant and had registered him as her son to protect the daughter, unmarried and under age at the time.
So certificates are not always factually correct either. I have several where the mother has invented a fictitious father, and one where both the named parents returned to the registration office with a statutory declaration four months after the initial birth registration, as a result of which the father was removed from the certificate completely, and the mother's surname and former name were amended, both differing from the names she had originally given.
It is really a matter of not taking anything for granted, and always seeking corroboration wherever possible. In the latter case above, it was a census record that actually revealed the discrepancy which led me to the birth certificates, and an army record for the woman's husband plus electoral registers that suggest the man removed from the original certificate (a lodger in her home whilst her husband was serving overseas) was almost certainly the father of the child despite the subsequent declaration.