When The Tree Becomes a Shrouded Forest

[Matt R]

Just thought I would start a topic on what I generally perceive to be "larger than life" trees, and was wondering at roughly what figure people would start to be suspicious of when hearing the total of individuals/documents tallied in other people's research on correspondences.

I myself have been at this tree for four years and have not confirmed all ancestors yet but have mostly, and my tree numbers 4,000 people including all branches, mostly dad's side going back to 1500's.

Where do you all start to get suspicious? I have had a fair few tell me of their thousands of ponds worth of purchasing certs and thousands of documents...and I just think "Pull the other one". I once saw a tree on GR with 78,000 people in it. I somehow felt very unkeen to trust any information on it.

Thought I would throw this one out there and see what response it gets

Regards,

Reayboy!

[perth tiger]

i emsiled someone not long since, they had a couple of matches with my grandparents. when i went to the website they had around 250,000 names on there. as you will guess it was a very distant link 

[silvery]

My thoughts are that it gets a bit ridiculous.   Even going back 7 generations (parents counting as one) to the 5xG grandparents, we share less than 1% of our genes with them.   And with the wider family it gets even less.

[charlotteCH]

250,000... I hope every one of them was properly documented   .... all a bit absurd

[Lady Di]

I know there's always comments about the "larger than life trees" on the net - and most people tend to be rather suspicious of these - possibly with good reason in some cases  

I thought the same thing until a person with whom I have been corresponding and sharing research for some years, admitted that they had abt 35,000 on their tree. If I didn't know better, I'd be doubtful of the content but to my surprise they have well over 600 wills (fully transcribed), thousands of certs and has spent more money on archive records than I will ever see.

Sometimes the preconceived notion of "name collectors" is not always correct.

Di

[perth tiger]

250,000... I hope every one of them was properly documented   .... all a bit absurd

it was just trees added to trees added to trees. all the names where indexed and i got told what the connection was and invited to put mine on there. i declined

[silvery]

I don't know.   I still think it's name collecting, even with that many wills and documents.
It's a hobby turned into an obsession and a compulsion.  
Time to do an OU course or something similar by then I think.

[charlotteCH]

It's not FH as we all understand and practise it.  It's a different thing alltogether.  Best left alone, I'd reckon
charlotte

[LoneyBones]

Geeees, I'm just a pup then.  I just had a quick wizz through my Legacy files, the highest number I noticed was 1897. What a relief to know I'm not as addicted or as obsessed as I thought I was.   
Altho' I have been invited to check out a cousin's tree, I took one look at the number of files and gave it a miss. I couldn't cope with numbers that big.
Leonie.