Ancestry family trees full of lazy errors

[Steve3180]

I am currently ignoring 44208 hints. Is this a record ? 

[alan o]

I ignore all genenet hits as a matter of course and all ancestry tree hints get reviewed record by record.  Some people just accept all hints and the results are ridiculous.

[LizzieL]

When ancestry took over Genenet and I started getting lots of hints from it, I discovered they were from my own genenet tree - so I knew they were OK  . But it annoyed me so much I deleted my Genenet tree.
I take care when I look at trees which appear to be carefully researched with large numbers of census images, bmd record images etc attached, because these "sources"  may not actually be relevant to the tree. I have seen this many times. Only yesterday I saw a tree where the owner had recorded an ancestor's mother as Ann, yet attached multiple sources to show the mother was Louisa. I suspect her of copying blindly from somewhere else without bothering to open the accompanying record images. Louisa was actually her direct ancestor so I would have though she would have taken more care.

[LizzieL]

Even the unsourced trees are worth looking at.  More than once I've found useful tips in them.  Just because someone doesn't note the source of their information doesn't mean that there was no source.

My own tree on Ancestry appears to have no sources. I upload it periodically as a gedcom created by my Family tree maker software. All my sources are on that off line tree, either as images of the record - if in a format that can be saved to the tree. Or transcribed by me in the notes section for old ones in Dejavu or similar format. These all get lost when I create a GEDcom. I haven't enough time left on this planet  to add back all these images on my Ancestry, especially as I upload again every few months when I have made significant additions to my FTM tree.

[David Nicoll]

Steve3180 - no it’s not a record, I have over 64000 hints.

Like many people here I take hints with a very large pinch of salt, and do my own research to verify. However, hints can be a great source of otherwise unfindable information.

I have a photograph of my grandmother’s cousins grave in South Africa, shared by a distant relative, I would not have got that without a hint.

I would very much rather have hints which occasionally turn up gold with lots of dross, than no hints.
Very much like DNA matches, lots of groups who I can see are all related, and so linked somehow, but very distant. But that occasional group that links up and proves a previously lost person.

I have a lot of relatives who “vanished” in the 18th and 19th centuries, with DNA they are now turning up all over the world.

[Steve3180]

David - That makes me feel somehow inadequate !

I am sure there will be some excellent hints in my paltry 44,000, but how do you sort the wheat from the chaff ?

[LizzieL]

I've got 54545 hints, so you're now 3rd in the table, Steve 

[Wexflyer]

A question for those with 10s of thousands of hints: how large are your family trees?

(I only have hundreds  )

[LizzieL]

i have 12458 people in my tree and 54545 hints in my main tree
Another tree I manage has 44 prople and 308 hints, but some are for people i have recently deleted because I discovered they weren't related