Impossible births

[mcleeds]

How about someone listing a woman born in Bedfordshire in 1800 as having 3 different baptisms, 2 in Sussex, 1 in Sheffield (!), in 1798 and 1799 before they were even born!

God, they were quick!

[LizzieL]

How about someone listing a woman born in Bedfordshire in 1800 as having 3 different baptisms, 2 in Sussex, 1 in Sheffield (!), in 1798 and 1799 before they were even born!

God, they were quick!

Common occurrence - baptism before birth - the more the better 

[coombs]

Baptism before birth, or people having children in infancy.

At least the saying of "All children are conceived within marriage - except the firstborn" holds weight.

[mcleeds]

I think a big part of the problem here is a lot of casual 'genealogists' view family trees as a kind of story, rather than actual history.

[HughC]

"Oh look: there's a John Smith.  Must be the one I'm missing."

I'm convinced that the first rule of family history in the USA is "anything goes".

When I pointed out to one woman there that Michael John Burke, son of an Anglican clergyman (a member of the Irish landed gentry), was not her labourer ancestor buried in a Catholic graveyard in the USA but the well-documented one after whom Burke's Pass in New Zealand is named, she retorted "Just can't get through to a mule".  Indeed.

[Stanwix England]

I blame Ancestry for this to be honest. It's a constant battle with the terrible hints, and the whole site is US weighted in the algorithm I'm sure.

I was filling out a profile a few days ago, of a person born in the UK. I kept getting hints for a different person with a surname that was similar but not the same. Despite the fact I'd established their birth (in the UK) and death (in the UK) and residence across a few census records (all in the UK), it kept suggesting this other USA based person. I can see why it's so easy to make a slip up.

[KGarrad]

I blame Ancestry for this to be honest. It's a constant battle with the terrible hints, and the whole site is US weighted in the algorithm I'm sure.

I was filling out a profile a few days ago, of a person born in the UK. I kept getting hints for a different person with a surname that was similar but not the same. Despite the fact I'd established their birth (in the UK) and death (in the UK) and residence across a few census records (all in the UK), it kept suggesting this other USA based person. I can see why it's so easy to make a slip up.

We know that Ancestry is US-centric; so add UK (or United Kingdom) to any address on BMD records.
Simples!

[andrewalston]

Ancestry are particularly bad at dealing with addresses. If you are less than pedantic about entering proper addresses, they "assume", and being a US company, they assume badly. If you omit part of the address, Ancestry resorts to its own gazetteer, which is often wrong (and they refuse to fix it).

Thus you come across people in trees being born and buried in "Birmingham, AL, USA" or "Manchester, Jamaica" when they obviously never left the UK.

Even where the dataset includes proper addresses, adding a record to a tree strips out that address, leaving trees which are bereft of anything useful. For the 1939 register they even strip out the TOWN!

Because the ads tell punters that "it's all done for you", people assume that is the way things are supposed to look.

[Viktoria]

Only today I found that two of my mother’s sisters were baptised before they were born!
Perhaps my grandma took a bath,even though she may not have needed one, like Elizabeth The First!
Viktoria.