Beware online family trees

23/4/2012

I've been working on a project for a client involving research into a group of unrelated but historically connected people. Quite a few of these people appear in online family trees.

AFTER I did my research on each person I checked out the online trees to see if I had missed anything. I was staggered by the very high degree of inaccuracy I found. I estimate over 90% of the trees had incorrect data for basic birth, marriage and death facts. Given that these people were unrelated, this was not just one "family historian" posting misinformation but many separate individuals.

On the plus side, 1% of the online trees led to gold dust such as family photographs or digital images of primary source material.

3 Comments

Priscilla Thomas link

20/7/2012 08:20:24

I totally agree with you! I have been a keen genealogist (doing my own tree) for nearly 30 years, and have recently set up my own site to help trace people's trees. I am astounded by the way people simply 'attach' themselves to your tree, which may grow theirs considerably, but you are left with branches that simply do not add up!!
I am very impressed by your websites - I can only aspire to reach the same level as yourself!

Caroline Gurney link

20/7/2012 09:02:52

I'm afraid the problem is a common one, Priscilla. I reached the end of my tether with people "grafting" branches of my Ancestry tree into their own and switched the tree from being Public to Private. Individuals from my tree still show up when people do an Ancestry search but the searcher then has to contact me for more information about the individual and their family relationships. I do share my tree freely online on my personal website: www.carosfamily.com. The name collectors don't seem to venture away from Ancestry into other parts of the internet.

Thank you for your kind remarks about my websites. This one and Sodbury Genealogy: www.sodburygenealogy.com are both built using Weebly: http://www.weebly.com, which is incredibly easy to use. The basic version is also free. I am a big fan of Weebly and am hoping to give a talk about using it to create genealogy websites later this year.

Best wishes for your new business.

Magda link

30/7/2012 10:31:23

The site does look great . We have ours on Drupal but I am not a web designer or developer so find I spend too much time fixing the website than doing work . weebly may be the answer.
After 20 years staying away from ancestry , rootsweb , ect to post the family history of my family history, I discovered wiki in www.werelate.org to post my family history . I do not have to see how people will misalign the branches .As I get older and now that the future generations of genealogist will want everything " in a cloud " , I also started my French side on www.wikitree.com as it says you can set privacy levels and also decide you gets to graft onto a branch . Time will tell ...........

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Beware online family trees

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