When you find an error on someone else's tree, do you tell them?

[wrjones]

There are many many Trees on Ancestry which I find have such obvious errors in them!Unless they concern any of my relatives,quite frankly I could spend literally hours contacting people on Amcestry to point out these errors.

It does however raise one of the most basic rules of research;Never accept someone else's research at face value,always check it out for yourself.

Regards
William Russell Jones.

[Melbell]

Thanks Eadaoin - I don't feel so alone in my attitude any more!  I cannot but agree with WR Jones (without sounding like a dinosaur): the old back to basics research is the only 100% trusty method really, however much we all love using the internet to help us on our way.
However, I respect other people's methods and realise that - let's face it - we all have massive problems accessing the original records most of the time!

Melbell.

[Shaztoni]

I have told some people before but sometimes it falls on deaf ears, what is worse is those that have copied parts of my tree before I learned of errors I had without citing sources so it is just more false information out there.

[BordersCrafter]

If it is a serious researcher who has made a mistake I would contact them. If it is clearly a work of fiction I stay well away from them so they nare not tempted to copy more of my genuine info. I have an American fiction artist who has one of my Northumbrian relatives who died in WW1 in her tree with US parents and birthplace. I know he is mine and he is English. He was born in Amble, has a headstone there and I have his widow's penny in my cupboard. Not planning to tell the plagiarist that though.

Recently I found 6 trees which had my great grandfather in them, and all had his parents wrong (they were born after him!!!) and when I contacted them all to let them know of the error, they all denied having him in their tree.  I have put this down to a glitch on Ancestry, and now I just ignore people who have the wrong information.  I know that my information is correct so I reckon it's up to them if they want to continue with wrong information in their trees.

[weste]

Funny enough i've about the same amount of people giving wrong names for gg grsndparents i left them alone i was fed up of pointing ovious errors out.It was obvious one lot had gone wrong and the others copied/I notice no one copied the right ones! Somone connected my tree to a baroness. At that point i made my tree private. If they want to follow wrong lines that's their problem i've decided.

[LizzieW]

I don't think these tree owners do any of their own research they just copy from other people.  I've noticed trees that have people with similar names to people in my, or my husband's, tree, but they have them married to the wrong people, or as Ancestry's default seems to be USA, they have them living and dying in places in USA with similar names to places in UK.  I even found one - nothing to do with any of my ancestors I just noticed it one day - that has someone dying on D-day on Normandy Beach,  Ocean, New Jersey, USA

[mofid42]

I noticed one day that someone had strangely attached my 3x Gt grandparents, who spent their entire lives living in London UK, as the parents of a child born in Manchester UK.
 Not only did they have an entirely different surname to their "child", the tree owner also had the child living his life in Manchester UK but mysteriously dying in Manchester Jamaica!
 I am guessing the death place was a mistake most likely due to Ancestry's preference for place names from their side of rhe pond in the drop down menu, but I can't begin to image why the tree owner chose to add my 3xGt grandparents to their tree!

[BonnieDownUnder]

 ... I have a family tree on A***y which was public but was forced to turn into a private setting.  The reason being, I had a person starting to copy all of my ancestors including photos, documents, onto their tree and when I checked their tree, they had 20,000 odd people listed!  I contacted A and they weren't a bit interested.  That, I just don't get!

[supermoussi]

Surely the whole point of researching your family history is to make sure its accurate and it is YOUR ancestors you are adding to your tree.

Brace yourselves here but this may upset the more sensitive souls out there:-

Some research was done which found that about 1 in 20 of the fathers stated on birth certificates wasn't actually the real father. This means that the further you go back in time there will be an ever increasing number of people on your tree who are not biologically related to you, even if you have got the correct "theoretical" line. The only lines you can really be certain of are your paternal and maternal lines which can be verified by DNA.

Scary huh? I sort of think of all of my "middle" lines as giving an overall fuzzy picture of how things were, but take any one line with a pinch of salt, especially as you get further and further back in time!