genealogy website has wrong information?

anonymous

2012-10-08 04:03:02 UTC

> How do they get away with that

Ancestry has a limited number of people, and limited funds. The idiots can get away with it because Ancestry doesn't check user-submitted trees. I could, if I was feeling puckish, put a tree there that showed I was the love child of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. (I'm not, of course. I'm the love child of Abraham Lincoln, the president, and Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale".)

That's one of the biggest reasons we top 10 all tell beginners not to trust the family trees there; use them as clues. (Some of the "official" records are wrong too. About 1/8 of the parents' birthplaces on the US Census from 1880 - 1930 are wrong. People go from being male in 1920 to female in 1920, and I found one in which the mother and daughter had switched names. There is a 1-year discrepancy in the 1900 census birth year and the SSDI birth year on at least 10% of the individuals I look up.)

> is there anything I can do to fix it?

You can write to the person who has the tree, citing sources.

You can put a comment on the individual, citing sources.

If the details are in an "official" record, like the census, you can add a correction, citing sources.

Shirley T

2012-10-08 08:54:47 UTC

Family trees on Ancestry.Com or any website must be viewed very suspiciously. Even when you see the absolute same information on the same people from many different subscribers that doesn't mean the information is accurate as too many people copy without verifying. If you contacted Ancestry.Com they would simply tell you that is between you and the other subscriber. They don't get involved. It would be too costly for them to hire people to verify all the info people submit. I have been there, done that. Their ads are very misleading when they show someone pointing to a family tree. If you contact the subscriber he/she might respond and then you might not hear anything at all.

Ancestry.Com is a great site for the amount of original source records they have but family trees on their website or any website must not be viewed as a record. Some people are more anxious to see how many names they can have in their database rather than a good verifiable family tree. That is why you see some trees with 50,000, 100,000 names. They are copying and not taking the time to verify. They are just name collectors. That's all.

Amaretta

2012-10-08 23:42:37 UTC

When I first joined Ancestry.com, I made my family tree a public tree. As soon as I posted my great-grandfather's information, I started seeing him pop up in other people's family trees. But they added wives, children and parents that he didn't have. I've met all of his children and I have the original records to back up my research, so I KNOW that my data is correct. But he has a very common Hungarian name and other people added him to their family trees because they have an ancestor with the same name -- but it's not the same person. They just don't care. They figure it's close enough, he came from the same country and settled in the same town, so it must be the same guy. There's a lot of sloppy and careless genealogy research out there. You can't build an accurate family tree by grafting on bits and pieces of other people's research because you can't count on its accuracy. You have to verify it yourself using original records -- birth certificates, Social Security records, census data, church records, etc.

Boomer Wisdom

2012-10-09 00:57:49 UTC

All trees (in fact, all genealogical dissertations) need to have source citations before they can be considered potentially useful.

After that, it is incumbent upon the researcher to investigate the source citations and verify they are valid before any conclusions are drawn.

In that way, genealogy is a bit more like science, as it requires individuals to verify and duplicate anothers work. From scratch.

When I see a tree without citations, I just think it's cute.

And useless.

Therefore, either contact the person and provide useful source documents to them as a favor, or simply ignore their tree.

Observer

2012-10-08 17:55:49 UTC

Welcome to my world, My Stepfathers niece copied my mothers and fathers charts and then added incorrect information. This woman is not related in any manner to any of these people and refuses to remove them from her Ancestry Tree or make corrections. I have sent a complaint letter to Ancestry and have gotten no response. So I have been going through the ancestry trees she has created that include my lineage and tacked a message onto every one that is mine: "The owner of this tree is the Niece of My Stepfather. She is not related to anyone in the ABC lineage and copied all the information from various sites on the internet. There are several errors and although she has been asked to delete the portion of this family after My Mother, she has refused. She has also refused to correct errors within the information she has uploaded." ABC represents the name of the first person in the lineage (my mother). You could add comments to ever error you find, but I would also include the source of your information. Errors on Ancestry are frequent because there is not submission standard and Ancestry doesn't verify the information submitted. GOOD LUCK.

Maxi

2012-10-08 08:24:05 UTC

The internet is full of lets pretend trees, and it will become worse as people copy and paste anything and think genealogy is a competition and the aim is to be seen to get back way before it is possible to do so............

10 years ago I found part of my tree online, it was wrong I contacted the owner of the tree to tell them and offered to send them copies of all the real records which proved they were mistaken...I got a curt reply back to tell me they had used 'records' to research and they wre correct.... they had used the IGI which unfortuneately many people think are records, they are useful but only useful as a clue, renamed now as 'collections' people still build 'their' whole tree using them ......... silly as they are as they say collected data, not records and too many errors as well as complete fabricated information..... that tree is now all over the internet so it seems people think that if they see it lots of times it must be correct..........

Websites duck out and say it is between the two of you, so unless that person obligies then it will remain........... one reseason I would NEVER post my verified cited research online, just to get it copied and pasted and added to their lets pretend trees... no they can spend 30 years doing their own 'research' .............

So ask, if the answer comes back as no or more likely they ignore you then learn you have to accept badly researched information, copy and paste is on there...and DON'T add to it by entering any information in these collection internet websites such as ancestry, familysearch, and others as each time you enter information it is collected by them belongs to them and sold/used by them as some of that data has been used by people like the one you are asking about to add to 'their' tree

R T

2012-10-08 07:58:04 UTC

Contact the person and correct him. He would probably love to have the correct information from a reliable source.