Ancestry family trees full of lazy errors

[coombs]

Some heraldic visitations can be peppered with errors like Ancestry trees. The late Guy Etchells said that heraldic visitations can be the 1500s and 1600s versions of modern day Ancestry trees.

[BushInn1746]

Hello coombs

Yes, some printed trees were only based on similar information that we may have available today and depended a lot on a person's thoroughness to try and trace that information and records.

Historian, Sir William Dugdale (1605 to 1686) when he did his Visitations in various Counties recorded some Families, or what he was able to find out. Later editions were then altered it seems.
https://archive.org/details/dugdalesvisitati03dugd/page/n9/mode/2up


Storr of Hutton Bushell / Hutton Buscel ; Scalm ; Wistow ; Brayton, which contains a few Pedigree notes
https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/storr_remarks/pages/pedigree.html


The original printed Pedigree Notes on the Tree diagram are attached here at Reply #1039 but there are some more pages printed about the family in the same 19 page article:-
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=756955.msg6750770#msg6750770

Mark

[Isabel H]

Anyone who searches for a certain man on Ancestry will find him in many trees, most of which have the same surname for his wife. My tree appears to be an outlier, with a different (documented) name for her, and I suspect that because of that many people will dismiss my information assuming the majority must be correct.

Not one of the other researchers/tree-copiers has spotted that if the easily-found marriage they have settled on were correct, the groom would have been 14yrs old and his bride only 2! 
That marriage is of a man with the same name to a woman with the same forename. His nationality fits, the wife’s does not. I researched them too out of interest, and our chap was still alive long after both of them were dead and buried.

It seems to me that Ancestry’s advertising is misleading, in that it suggests that all you have to do is type in a name and your entire family history will be revealed, no effort required. Could that be at least partly why so many people fail to research properly and produce “family trees” that are mostly fiction?

[Eyesee]

I have one person whose death I have been trying to find for a while. He is on quite a few trees, with the correct parents, but has a death year and location that there is no record for, anywhere. The years of birth and death for his parents vary considerably as well. They never left their home country, but on some trees have both died in the country the son went to.

He married before he left his home country, and had some children there, and then some more in the country he went to. His wife has also been difficult to find, but the thing that gets me is the names given for her parents on some of the trees, the same as her husband. Not sure what those people were thinking. Marrying your sister might have been okay once but not in modern times.

One person has probably set up the initial tree, and then others have just copied it, or just accepted hints.

Would have to agree with Isabel H's comments, and in particular the last sentence of her post from today - "Could that be at least partly why so many people fail to research properly and produce “family trees” that are mostly fiction?"

My two cents worth.
Ian C

[LizzieL]

all you have to do is type in a name and your entire family history will be revealed,

Yes of course that's how it works .... doesn't it ?
Spending over forty years on meticulous research was obviously the wrong way 

There are and always will be lazy people, who can't be bothered to do their own research and those who seem to set out to deliberately mislead people.
I have a reasonably large DNA match (80 cM across 6 segments) who has what appears to be a well researched tree going back several generations, but I could find no common ancestor. Shared matches indicate which line we should converge on. One big omission is the date of death of his maternal grandfather. I checked him out and discovered he was killed in 1917 in Belgium. No doubt the right chap, CWGC give the names and residence of his parents and his wife whom he had recently married. The problem is the supposed daughter of this man was born in 1920. I contacted the match and told him what he had found. He replied that he knew all about his "grandfather's" death but wasn't correcting his tree. This was some years ago just after I got my DNA results. He still hasn't corrected his tree and it has now spawned a multitude of erroneous copies. These copies fall into two groups. Those who have actually found the correct death date and recorded it, but include the daughter (obviously produced by IVF using frozen sperm !) as his biological child. And those who have either not found the death on CWGC site or ignored it because it didn't fit their preconceived ideas that there was "NEVER any illegitimacy in their family", and found a man with the same name (quite common) who died in 1977 (but was two years younger and born in a different place) and decided that was the correct death.

[martin hooper]

Yes I think there must be many people who respond to the advertising by ancestry and take a passing interest in their family history. Not realising that you have to make some effort to get the right results.

It's a shame that they miss out on those eureka moments when you solve a puzzle.

Martin

[coombs]

I am always intrigued by the "Births registered in, January, February and March" writing at the top of the pages in the birth entries for the first quarter of the respective years, knowing how 6 weeks was at least recommended to register a birth, and wondering how many of the births took place in the last 2 months of the previous year. I would say about 30% to 40% of births registered in say, the first quarter of 1945, took place in late 1944. This probably means to buy an actual downloadable version of their birth cert through the GRO website will be available in 2045 or 2046.

A distant cousin was born on 1 Dec 1928 in London, and his birth appears in "Births registered in, January, February and March 1929". I looked at 2 of the other 5 entries on the page, and two of them were born in late and late-ish Nov 1928, so the births were likely registered in early Jan 1929. Another tree on Anc has the distant cousin as being actually born in 1929, using the quarter in which the birth was registered. I found the 1 Dec 1928 DOB for Andrew from 1939 register.

My step 3xgreat gran's death was registered in the first quarter of 1929. I got the cert from the GRO website downloadable feature and found that she died on 31 Dec 1928, and registered 2 Jan 1929. Other trees have her as dying in 1929, but probably only because they have not obtained the death cert yet. I added the correct year of death, as it was very very late 1928.

[jonwarrn]

I am always intrigued by the "Births registered in, January, February and March" writing at the top of the pages in the birth entries for the first quarter of the respective years, knowing how 6 weeks was at least recommended to register a birth, and wondering how many of the births took place in the last 2 months of the previous year.

Vaccination registers
Info taken from the registrars births
Presumably the date of notice given is date of registration
First entries in January 1889
One from October, three from November, one super fast one from late December
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSDP-WSQG-H

[Zaphod99]

6 weeks was not a recommendation, it was a requirement, that births were registered within 42 days.  It didn't always happen though as I'm sure we've all found out.

Zaph