Does ancestry.com check any of the info in their "public trees" for accuracy?

Question

Does ancestry.com check any of the info in their "public trees" for accuracy?

Answer 1

No and it does have a disclaimer indicating that they are not responsible for errors . It has become obvious that some people simply copy the charts that have been submitted and then they upload it as their own.

Answer 2

No, they don't. That's why all of us top 10 warn you to verify what you see. It would be economically impossible; they'd need to spend as many people-hours as their users did in research.



I always use Roots Web World Connect as an example, because it is free to all, with no registration, and its query form is easier to use. Think of it as an early model of the Public Trees. The LDS AF and goodly portions for the LDS IGI are the same thing too - massive data bases gathered from user-submitted data.



Here's RWWC:

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi



Try it yourself. The first European settlement in Ohio was Marietta, founded in 1788. Leave surname and given name blank, enter "OH" in the birth place, enter 1767 in the birth year, set the range to (+/-) 20, to get 1747 - 1787, and look at how many entries you get. Some are Native Americans. The rest are erroneous entries from people who didn't know their history.



As of just now (June 15, 2011) there are 31,719 total. 1% - 3% are Indians. The rest are mistakes.



That's easy to spot. So was a non-Hispanic man I saw once born in California in 1787, in Porterville, 300 miles from the nearest Spanish mission. So are women who give birth at age 7 or 57.



Other errors, like having an uncle for a father or the wrong wife as the mother of the children in the middle, are not as easy to see.



(John and James are brothers. Michael is the son of John, but he didn't get along, or James didn't have any sons, so Michael lived with his uncle James from age 14 on. James gets recorded as his dad by people who see him in the 1850, 1860 and 1870 census, but not the 1880, since James died in 1879, leaving his farm to Michael.)



(Hezekiah has three wives, one after the other, death dates uncertain. He has a large family and doesn't know how to cook, so he is married a year after each wife dies. The kids appear every 2 - 3 years; which of two possible mothers is accurate for the kids born right around the death and remarriage years is tough.)



The volunteers at my FHC estimate 25% of the AF is wrong, and 15% of the IGI. I estimate, just by gut feeling, that 20% of RWWC is wrong. I should add I use it every day, I post post-ems to people who don't seem like fools (Anyone with more than 100,000 individuals counts as a fool, in my book) but I am NOT an expert, nor have I done any systematic research on the error rate.



> Many trees saying the same thing doesn't make it accurate.

Hear! Hear! Truer words were never said, and yours should be in big letters at the top of every page on all of the mega-sites that accept GEDCOMs from the public.



At one point in RWWC, before Ancestry got up to full steam, there was quite the competition to see who could get the most individuals. I suspect some fools are playing that game in Ancestry today.



One such fool on RWWC copied my data, which had my brothers, first cousins and me as "Living Pack", then ran his merge without thinking. It merged all of the men named "Living Pack" in my generation into one individual, with six wives - those of my brothers, first cousins and mine. This bigamist has two sets of parents, one mine, one my father's brother and his wife. It's a mess, but the person who did it has 250,000+ individuals in his collection.

Answer 3

Nooooooooo and all of us are glad you ask the question. Ancestry.Com is a great site for original source records but you must distinguish between the records they have obtained and put online and their subscriber submitted family trees. Also don't go willy nilly adding documents they give you as hints to people without looking them over carefully and thinking about it. Now they have some computer programmers that are making a hash out of the site. For instance I use to could upload into photos on my trees copies of death certificate I found on FamilySearch.org from my documents folder where they land when I save them from FamilySearch.org. Now I can't upload photos from my documents folder. FamilySearch.org is a great site for original source records and they aren't through yet uploading all the records they have. I can view and print off copies of original Texas death certificates through 1976 on their site.



Let me give you a hysterical example. One of my great great grandfathers had a son, grandson, brother and nephew by the name of Zachariah Berry Jackson. I wanted to make contact with some family of the brother and nephew and put the name in for family trees. The only others I found that weren't my entries were for the son (who was also my paternal grandfather's maternal uncle). Anyway that uncle had been widowed twice and married 3 times. The tree did not have his first wife but for the second wife the tree had he married her in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. I felt for a farmer from Gonzales County, Texas to go all the way to NJ in 1891 to marry her she really must have been something! Of course I already had a record of his marrying her in Gonzales County.

Then I got to checking and found out that my sister, my brother-in-law and myself had all married and died in Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. The subscriber had my b-i-l as my spouse as well as my sister's and their children as mine. Also since the only time my sister and I had ever been in NJ was in 1957 when our family drove through it coming back from New York, you can see how long we have been dead. Then I got to checking further and I found that family on both my mother's and father's side had married and died in, you guessed it, Newton, Sussex County, New Jersey. Since most of my ancestry is southern American colonial except some Irish ancestors that came into Savannah about 1800 and a set of great great grandparents and a great grandfather who came into the Port of New Orleans in 1853, I was surprised even further.



Then one of my great great grandmothers was Emeline or Emaline Dumas. She was the daughter of Stephen Dumas and she had a sister Eveline but Stephen's brother Azariah also had an Emeline and an Eveline. You guessed it a lot of people have my great great grandmother as being the daughter of Azariah Dumas.



One of my great grandmothers had 2 marriages and by her first she had only 3 children but I have seen trees with her having about 9 children by her first marriage. Her maiden name was fairly common in Georgia.



Be particularly suspicious of their One World Tree program. It is trash.



Here is a link I found on YouTube and this young lady hits the nail on the head.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6JLoXpwBeI

Answer 4

No, they are subscriber submitted for sharing.



The similar analogy would be asking Facebook to verify that I didn't lie when I said I was Superman's cousin and Valentino's lover. They only provide the space and place for me to post the information and for you to access it. They do not provide the information, therefore they are not responsible for it.

Answer 5

Ancestry.com or no other website checks for accuracy on public trees and you see many are wrong as people copy and paste others work then upload as a quick way of building a tree as they think quantity is more important than quality.........so never trust any online tree, like you I have seen many of 'my' family on online trees and not one of them are correct, at first i would contact them and offer copies of the real records to prove to them and never get an answer as many defend 'their' collections of unrelated names on the basis that 12 trees all say the same thing...at the moment I am trying to help several people in the US who's 'online trees' are wrong, not only wrong dates for births/baptisms but wrong people in their tree as they have trusted each other without looking at records and used ancestry.com hints from their ;'harvested information' collected each time anyone puts anything on their website...they trust a newspaper obituary and a gravestone transcription of birth and baptism date ( secondary information at best) over a baptism record from the church so think their ancestor was born 4 years prior to when he was and was 4 years old when baptised, even though in the record it states he was 6 days old when baptised and another child in the family was born within 5 months of the date they have for him, they have the wrong mother so her family are all wrong, even though I have a copy of the marriage banns and marriage record of the real parents and their 'mother' came from another county..............so you can't help some people regardless of records as they are so used to trusting online hints of a computer programme, trusting others information and are prepared to go with the majority regardless of how they got the information and trust secondary information over primary records.



The sad thing is I have been contacted by 'someone' else in the UK researching this family and have shared with him as he too had the same information.........only to now find the group in the US are paying this person to do research for them, it is he who has given/sold them this wrong information in the first place and is sitting on ancestry.com and familysearch, so not doing 'research' at all, which is like many who offer FH research for a fee they have never been inside a records office and are taking money from people under false presences and using collected/donated/website information rather than real research work with cited record reference....so they have a collection of unrelated names an because they paid for it they trust it..sad!

Answer 6

No.



That would be impossible. It's not a "Trust but verify" issue. It's a "mistrust and disprove" issue.



Trees are only useful to give you possible clues of where to look for real documents. It helps if the trees have excellent source citations, but most do not.



As for original source documents: These can't be trusted, either. Even the pros don't trust these.



Genealogy deals a lot with philosophical questions like "What is Truth?" and "What is Reality?" and "How can we know anything for certain?" Generally, it just gets down to a huge amount of really sweaty detective work and exhausting research. Learn the methodology; the data is actually often a trap.



Think of public trees as a tip about a crime that was phoned in to your police department from an unknown drug addict. It's just a questionable lead.



Genealogy is a fun addiction, it probably won't kill you, and it will keep you from destroying your mind with too much daytime TV. Have a blast.

Answer 7

Hi, Dor...and congratulations, you are ready to be a regular here now. We post this warning maybe 10 times a day (ok..maybe 5, we take turns).

People are sadly more interested in fast, easy, free, than accurate data. Rootsweb is another free/popular site for uploaded family trees.

They are not all garbage. What we look for are notes and sources..these allow you to go back and validate.

I especially dislike their ad "you don't have to know what you are looking for, you just have to start looking".

Ok, my vent for the night.

Answer 8

No they absolutely don't. In fact, the way the "hints" are set up encourages inaccurate information. They sort of average all the trees if you don't choose only the trees you want to copy. Unfortunately they have probably done more to encourage junk genealogy than any other single company. The only one worse, IMHO, is Geni where other people can make changes to your tree based on their own wrong information.



Ancestry has admitted that their business plan is to encourage the newbie at the expense of the experienced genealogist. Unfortunately it is also to acquire as much genealogy data as possible without bothering to make it easily searchable. A rush to the bottom. Very sad.

Answer 9

No; neither ancestry.com nor any of the others that have "public trees"/"user submitted trees" check any of the info. That would be nice, but of course, that would take time and money and raise the fees they already charge.



Then again, there is the problem that, really now, there are no accurate records now-a-days, let alone 2 - 3 centuries or longer ago.



Plus no one was around to take DNA samples of every baby born (not even now) to see if the father that is listed is the actual father. Take, for one famous example, the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone: his first born was not his child, but that of his brother. While Daniel was out cavorting with a Chief's daughter having Indian babies, his wife was lonely and got pregnant by his brother! Of course, at the time she had no way of knowing whether or not Daniel would ever come back...



My maternal Grandmother has birth and marriage certificates...with the incorrect surname. Her tombstone bears the middle initial of this erroneous family.



Census records for my Dad, my Mom, and older siblings have incorrect info, both State & Federal censuses.



Back to "public trees" one of them has one of my ancestors born in New York...in the 1580s! It further lists a bunch of siblings for my ancestors that could not possibly have been. On a brighter note, however, most of the info re ancestors proved to be correct. Usually when I see a glaring error, I ignore all the info; sometimes, however, I check other trees/sources to see what is correct.



Lots of people on here think that living persons are not listed on ancestry.com. Wrong! I am, all by siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins. I protested repeatedly..to no avail. Two of my brothers are misnamed; one uncle, who died 10 days before I was born, is listed as dying in the 1980s!



I find the most info from those trees; the trick is trying to "prove" those trees.



So, think of them as being "clues", or "hints": make a quick copy and try to "prove" the trees.



Whatever the source, try to find at least 3 sources; be sure to copy/write down the source. Oft times the source is some historical records.

Answer 10

No, Ancestry.com does not check for accuracy in public or private trees and no, there is no research on the error rate on the error rate in Ancestry.com public trees and records. Either one would be extremely labor intensive and therefore expensive.



Ancestry.com is well aware of this problem and if you were to try and report an error they would advise you that the problem would have to be worked out between you and the other subscriber.



Sadly, their advertising makes things worse because people who are new to genealogy subscribe to the service and start copying trees without any regard for their accuracy until they become a little more experienced and realize that some of the relationships in those trees in many cases are not even possible, like a person being the wife and child of the same man or a woman having chlldren before or way after her childbearing years.



One particular thing they do which is particularly confusing for new users is when you review hints from another members tree they show, for example:



Sources (6)

Records (5)

Photos (3)



In the preceding example, the ‘sources’ are actually other members trees and there are not records or it will show a notation something like, http:trees.ancestry.com/pt/…164128979, the records are actual records like US Census records or some other actual records and the photos are self explanatory. When people see those ‘sources’ they thing they are additional records and all it means is that at minimum 6 user trees have copied this information to their tree…probably without checking it for accuracy.



That is all I can add to what the others have posted other than take free classes, read newsletters and ask questions to learn the methods of genealogy. These step-by-step videos are a great place to start: https://www.familysearch.org/learn/getting_started_step_1 and there are many more under the Learn tab at the top of the page…on many different aspects of genealogy.

Answer 11

Always!! It's a very bad habit of mine! lol.....I can't help it,it's instinct I think........ yeah I always forget about the whole eye contact thing when I am talking to a guy! so if your wondering,whoa was that chick blatenly checking out my package or is she just shy looking down like that? she was checking out your package!