Lazy Research

[groom]

In my opinion, which I realise may not be that of others, it is up to me what I put in my tree, whether online or on paper. Obviously it is as correct as I can make it, but that is no guarantee that I won't change it at some point in the future if I find a mistake. I don't feel that I have to annotate it to warn others, any notes are for my own use and I don't feel guilty if anyone has copied it and taken my word for it without checking.

It really all goes back to the title of this thread "Lazy Research" doesn't it? If people want to take short cuts, they must be prepared to risk being led the wrong way. 

[Andrew Tarr]

My mother once told me about a genealogy conference she went to in the 90's where the professional genealogist giving a talk described how he had to lop off a whole branch of research when he found that an ancestor had died in childhood and not grown up to have offspring.

Not an ancestor then ? 

[DavidG02]

Its why my tree is private. Nobody else will spot my mistakes

[panic]

My mother once told me about a genealogy conference she went to in the 90's where the professional genealogist giving a talk described how he had to lop off a whole branch of research when he found that an ancestor had died in childhood and not grown up to have offspring.

Not an ancestor then ? 

Nope , but we all see trees out there where births are given but not deaths.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who sees errors in trees because someone has stopped at the first person they find who could fit and assumed it correct rather than eliminate all other possibilities.

[a chesters]

I've noticed, when peeking at some online trees linked to ancestors of mine, that there are quite a few trees with HUGE lists of children for one or two couples. In some cases it's fairly obvious that someone has merged two - or in some cases three families together - Lazy research, the fathers all had the same name, and were more-or-less in the same parish, BUT the mothers' names on the parish records were not the same, and if you checked out carefully even only online the places where the couples lived were named, so in most of those cases it was even with elementary research possible to sort out which couple had which children, but they'd not bothered even to do that. - and the birthdates / baptisms for the children imply some fantastically short gestation periods, even if you try to work a system out where children were baptised at very odd ages!!! Do people not think? Or check? And, as already mentioned, these silly errors get copied, and even compounded....
-But - Wow! They've usually got 100,000 names on their tree, and ancestry tracing directly back to Noah!
They'll never change. And if you send them a correction, even if politely suggesting that your own researches have found something different... well, you're wasting your efforts.

I have in OH's tree, back to about 1750's, I get to a point where I cannot be certain of the parents, as there are two men with the same name, married to wives with the same name, in the same village.  Which is the correct couple I have absolutely no idea, and have left that line at that point, with the appropriate note

[StevieSteve]

Assuming a likelihood that the husbands are somehow  related, might it not be worth trying to find their common ancestor and continue backwards from there?

[a chesters]

Unfortunately, at this point in time, trying to get further back is like the cats cradle, all sorts of twists and turns. Just which is correct...........

[Andrew Tarr]

I have in OH's tree, back to about 1750's, I get to a point where I cannot be certain of the parents, as there are two men with the same name, married to wives with the same name, in the same village.  Which is the correct couple I have absolutely no idea, and have left that line at that point, with the appropriate note 

And I suppose both men have the same occupation?  That is how I separated the broods of two Thomas/Ann marriages around 1800.  If they were Labourers of course ...

[ThrelfallYorky]

That's more or less how I actually untangled the three family groups I mentioned earlier. That was the group that one LR had tangled, through looking only at easily available on-line, and that other LRs had blithely followed.
All three "batches" of children had the same father's name.
Births spread over 40 (!) years, if I recall correctly.
But each wife had a different name.
One batch often had a location mentioned in connection with recorded events.
And here and there were mentions of the fathers' jobs.
Found the marriages of each man.

That lot all helped to organise information before going any deeper, and then...
Found burial of one wife, and burial of child on next day, linked to father's name & occupation (But that hadn't stopped someone "giving" child a whole life and family, and bundling it in with all the rest).
Created a table to jhelp me sort out birth/baptisms, etc..
Eliminated from being held in same family all 3 surviving siblings with same name and ages within 8 months....
Then started looking more deeply. Sorted "my" lot out from the other two quite quickly. From interest carried on trying to sort others into sep. families.
Found another wife death, plus a remarriage and two more children.... for one man

Then got REALLY serious, started really looking, and sorted them out, apart from one un-named child and a "John" I couldn't pin....

Provided chapter and verse on my findings to the LR with the biggest tree .... but it did mean his own ancestry would not be what he thought it was..... wonder why I thought it was a "He" - can't remember now. ..... but of course, never a reply, and tree remained unchanged. Quite glad he's not really that close a relative as he seemed to think!!!!
I'm delighted if someone suggests a correction / alternative to me.... then we can check it out, and hopefully learn a little more, a little more certainly. It's always good to go on learning.