How many times have you had to re-write your tree!!

[BourneGooner]

Hi All

How many times can you re-write your tree?
Just when you think you've got a person in your tree signed off, hatched, matched and dispatched etc. you find a document that throws it all up in the air and you have to start again.........
Example......I have a John Lock, baptized buried etc. etc. , then there's an Elizabeth Lock buried in the same church yard a year earlier than Johns burial as w/o John Lock. There is only the one John Lock I've come across so far so it has to be him (at least I thought it did  )
Now I find a Intestate document on the National Archives website for John Lock stating he is parent less and a bachelor. Bachelor HUH from the burial records for Elizabeth  I had him married. Although I never have been able to find a record for the marriage.

Ah well back to the drawing board - re-write the tree try and try and figure this one out.....

I guess if this genealogy lark was easy it would be as much fun or interesting.

BourneGooner

[Craclyn]

I wouldn’t call it rewriting my tree, but I have had to get the lopping shears out and prune a branch on a few occasions. I revisit my findings on a regular basis to see if I can still support the conclusions I arrived at several years ago when available information was much more sparse. The last time I did this was just a couple of weeks ago. Having DNA evidence to support that I am climbing the correct branches has been very helpful.

[pharmaT]

I wouldn't call it rewriting my tree, I've just tweaked my tree multiple times.

I had the wrong father for my Grt Grt Grandfather for years.  On both his marriage and death certificates his parents were named as John Campbell and Jessie Campbell nee Macpherson.  However I could not find his birth record.  According to his age on censuses, marriage and death he was born a year or 2 after civil registration had started in Scotland so in my list of possibilities I had that the family hadn't registered him.  They did live in a remote croft.  I did find John and Jessie's marriage in the parish registers and John's baptism too so added his parents too.  I then put this section of the tree aside and worked on other sections.  After about 10 Years I found John's death which seemed a tight time frame for being my grt grt grandfather.  This sent me off on another hunt which led to the discovery that my grt grt grandfather's birth had been registered under his mum's maiden name 19 months after John had died.  With more work I have established his true (alleged) biological father and now have supporting DNA evidence that he was indeed the father. 


I have kept John on my family tree and just fixed the relationships.  I have kept him because he as the husband of my 3x grt grandmother so part of her life and he was the father of some of my 3x grt aunts and uncles.

[Andrew Tarr]

As my tree fortunately has mostly unusual surnames (Young may be the commonest) I have so far avoided barking up many wrong ones - my obstacles are usually just blind alleys or untraced details.  Once or twice I have been rescued by the early Victorian habit of echoing earlier surnames as middle names.  That confirmed my suspicion that when Henry Pearson married Sarah Walton in 1806, it had in fact been Henry Piercy, as Walton reappeared in the next generation.

[River Tyne Lass]

I have 'Young' in my family tree and when I first started out it was a bit of work to track some of them down.

Looking at some of the trees on-line at the time I saw a date of death for a Great x 2 Grandmother called Elizabeth Young.  I had a gut feeling this was wrong so I began quietly my own search.  Eventually, I found her she had died some decades after my Great x 2 Grandfather, her husband, but she was in his grave with three of their children.  So that and the newspaper notices I found definitely confirmed she was the right one.

Then there was the search for my Great x 3 ancestors - John Young and Ann Young.  These were also shown as incorrect on-line.  Through a lot of research I was able to find the correct ones eventually - I have no doubt whatever that I have the correct ones through the accumulation of records found.  I found Ann eventually by trying to imagine what I would do in her life situation.  At the point I started looking for her I had last spotted her living with her eldest married son, after she had become a widow.  I imagined myself getting old and frail and decided that in her shoes I would now prefer to go into the care of a daughter rather than a daughter in law.  I then looked at the daughters.  One appeared to be a stay at home one and the other one seemed like she was quite busy with public affairs.  I then decided to focus on the stay at home one as the best candidate to focus on.  Lo and behold it turned out that this Great Grandmother did appear to have moved to the area of this daughter and had died in this daughter's home.  The death notice made everything so clear that I had at last found the correct Ann Young.

Mind I had to have help with another Ann from another descendant of this person - an ancestral 'cousin' of mine.  She was born Ann Isabella but married in a totally unexpected area away from all the family and married as 'Annie'.   Without this help I doubt I would ever have solved that one - it was like searching for a needle in a haystack!!

I would always advise if possible, don't take at face value other people's research, especially with common names.   

[Althea7]

I had to move somebody on an Ancestry tree to a different set of parents, and got in a real mess as I entered him with the other parents, then deleted him and thought I had lost his descendants and all the details like censuses...so I spent hours finding all this information on his descendants again, only to find I had a load of duplicates.  I then tried merging duplicates and getting into a worse mess.  Finally I deleted each duplicate individually.  I think I am straight now, it was maybe forty people.  I lost censuses along the way, but most information is still there.  I later found that I could have moved him cleanly with an Ancestry facility to move him and all his descendants to different parents by linking him as somebody already in my tree.  I did this on a second branch that I have just for this family, and it worked perfectly.

I had initially thought he was the child of one couple, then found his parents' marriage proving that he is their child, and his mother is the sister of who I thought was his father and sister in law has same first name.

It was very interesting though, a major discovery, as I thought I had lost track of his mother and then found that I have a living distant cousin descended from her.

[Craclyn]

Althea7, Next time you think you have lost a bunch of folks just search for one of the names. You can only delete one person at a time, not a whole branch. You just need to reconnect the branch again with the correct relationship.

[coombs]

Well I have had to get the shears out and prune the tree a few times, but often I find the right man was a namesake first cousin or second cousin of the wrong man/woman of the same name and surname. Ie 2 Thomas Spottiswood's in the same town, and then tracing the wrong one only to find he was his first cousin. Or 2 Lutrecia Edgington's of the same village.

I think when we have the likeliest, we are understandably hesitant to add them in case we find out something that contradicts it. Some may strongly advise against a "leap of faith" but some may say "well add them but keep a note and an open mind". In many of these "likeliest candidates" cases, you may never be completely certain. Records back then were not as well kept and as informative as they are now.

[pinefamily]

I agree with the above replies. Not so much a re-write as a prune or a snip. Most of the time the error is picked up in the research stage luckily so the only problem is time lost following the wrong family. That is my current dilemma, with too many possibilities to choose from; Smith in London.