Genealogy Forum UK

Are most of the hints generated on ancestory prompted by the info you have personally input?

steveb wrote:Are most of the hints generated on ancestory prompted by the info you have personally input?

They use info you've inputted for that person, but the hints they come up with can be very wide of the mark - I've had loads where the first name is different. And not just variants of the same name, but something way off mark!

There matching rules are quite good but works automatically only once.

So to make the most of it, do not enter a wife's given name only, otherwise it will match on her married surname.

i.e. If Betty Booop married Fred Bear and you didn't yet know the wife's maiden name. Entering her as a spouse with just Betty will give you matches for Betty Bear.

When you enter Boop into her surname later on, you will have to tell it to scan for Betty Boops otherwise you may miss out on matches.

It looks for several things.

Parents.

Place Of Birth

Year Of Birth

Spouse

Forename, Surname variations.

Sometimes it appears that the name is way off, but if you do a bit of investigating you will see why it has offered up a potential match.

There is always logic in what it offers up.

The only down side of it is the amount of rubbish people copy from other people's trees.

Ancestry Lemmings I call them.

The biggest amount of trees with the same error copied for an individual from one to another I have encountered is 115.

I was theonly one with the correct and verified information and 18 months later I still get messages telling me I am wrong because 115 unverified trees say so

Probably the biggest error I see is when it matches father and son, i.e Fred Bear Snr and Fred Bear Jnr match on many items including place of birth etc.

People suddenly accept Senior clues into Junior or vice verci.

Close cousins also cause confusion.

Fred Bear Jnr and his brother Teddy Bear might both have first sons called Fred Bear born close together and they all live in the same area.

It is amazing how many people transpose one Fred Bear's life over his first cousins!!

Yeh I've come across cousin swapping, I had the evidence to prove it wrong, and was nice enough to send a message to the person concerned - he still has the wrong man on his cousin.
On another tree there were the wrong parents, so from there on back his tree is going up the wrong branch - I informed him of this too and offered up my evidence even as far as offerering to send copies of the relevant certificates. He wrote back thanking me, but wasn't interested in copies, and again the tree remains the same!

I have a feeling that some people are just after trees with as many people on them as possible, and don't really care who those people are. I'm always wary of other peoples trees, but especially wary if I can see there are thousands of names and they appear to be one man/woman's work!

I keep my tree on Genes Reunited, just names, date and place of birth. Just really for making contact. I have made some very valuable contacts here, especially in the days when there was nothing on the internet to help.

I used to go to the local archives to look at census information and GRO indexes. I made a mistake on one family in the very early days, which looked like it ticked all the boxes, but didn't find out until a couple of years later, when looking through a will and there was more information on FreeBMD. I corrected it on my tree, but not until someone had copied information from my Genes tree and obviously it was passed around through Genes and Ancestry. It was a marriage I couldn't find at the time and I had added the wrong surname for the bride.

That mistake is still there now on Ancestry - I have seen it on a few trees. I did tell a couple of people that this information was incorrect, but they said they had it on good authority that it was OK. They still have the wrong name for the bride and have added loads of information for her side of the family, and are still climbing up the wrong tree. I do have the marriage, and could send them the details, but if they can't be bothered to check information themselves, or accept advice, why should I.

I love Mark's description “Ancestry Lemmings” - they do also have them on Genes Reunited.

I have over 13700 and they are all mostly my work but I know there are some obscure branches that may have bad data.

But the core is very well researched and I think if you look at the summary of a tree you can guess at the quality of the data.

13737 people with 19187 records. So there is plenty of references quoted in the tree.

I have 172 stories and over 1200 documents and certificates that I have also supplied to support the data.

So not all large trees are dodgy!

I also think that Ancestry does not make it easy to repair errors without a lot of deleting and recreating.

MarkCDodd wrote:I have over 13700 and they are all mostly my work but I know there are some obscure branches that may have bad data.

But the core is very well researched and I think if you look at the summary of a tree you can guess at the quality of the data.

13737 people with 19187 records. So there is plenty of references quoted in the tree.

I have 172 stories and over 1200 documents and certificates that I have also supplied to support the data.

So not all large trees are dodgy!

I also think that Ancestry does not make it easy to repair errors without a lot of deleting and recreating.

I agree that not all large trees are dodgy, but there are an aweful lot of people who can't be bothered to check out the info themselves.
I do use other peoples trees, if I can't find something myself, but then I double check it to make sure.

Mark, am I right in thinking that you did a little check on ancestry to see how many people just take things at face value. If my memory serves it was a child whodied before the father was born, or something similar - and only a few of the people who downloaded that info noticed the error!

Yep. A child that was born before his father was born was one of the dodgy pieces I deliberately planted just to see how many copied it blindly.

Genes Reunited is great for getting contacts but many people on that site are very possesive of their data.

On Ancesty about 95% of people have an open tree.

On Genes Reunited your tree is closed till you invite somebody and this contributes to a "mine...all mine!" attitude.

One trend that irritates me on Ancestry is when Americans accept American locations even when they know thier relative comes from the UK.

i.e Birmingham, Alabama instead of Birmingham, Warwickshire.

MarkCDodd wrote:Yep. A child that was born before his father was born was one of the dodgy pieces I deliberately planted just to see how many copied it blindly.

Genes Reunited is great for getting contacts but many people on that site are very possesive of their data.

On Ancesty about 95% of people have an open tree.

On Genes Reunited your tree is closed till you invite somebody and this contributes to a "mine...all mine!" attitude.

One trend that irritates me on Ancestry is when Americans accept American locations even when they know thier relative comes from the UK.

i.e Birmingham, Alabama instead of Birmingham, Warwickshire.

I think it is good to have the choice to open your tree or not.
I am on Genes and choose not to open my tree and it will stay like that.
I prefer the TP format where you can start a family and it doesn't need to connect to the
one ancestor already on you can't do that on Genes it has to connect who you add in.

MarkCDodd wrote:Genes Reunited is great for getting contacts but many people on that site are very possesive of their data.

On Ancesty about 95% of people have an open tree.

On Genes Reunited your tree is closed till you invite somebody and this contributes to a "mine...all mine!" attitude.

My tree on Ancestry is private, but I do reply to people who contact me and have helped and been helped by lots of others.
My tree on tribal pages is not private, and I welcome people getting in touch.
I agree abouts GR, people are very possesive there, and the forum is not the friendliest of places.

Antie Em wrote:I keep my tree on Genes Reunited, just names, date and place of birth. Just really for making contact. I have made some very valuable contacts here, especially in the days when there was nothing on the internet to help.

I used to go to the local archives to look at census information and GRO indexes. I made a mistake on one family in the very early days, which looked like it ticked all the boxes, but didn't find out until a couple of years later, when looking through a will and there was more information on FreeBMD. I corrected it on my tree, but not until someone had copied information from my Genes tree and obviously it was passed around through Genes and Ancestry. It was a marriage I couldn't find at the time and I had added the wrong surname for the bride.

That mistake is still there now on Ancestry - I have seen it on a few trees. I did tell a couple of people that this information was incorrect, but they said they had it on good authority that it was OK. They still have the wrong name for the bride and have added loads of information for her side of the family, and are still climbing up the wrong tree. I do have the marriage, and could send them the details, but if they can't be bothered to check information themselves, or accept advice, why should I.

I love Mark's description “Ancestry Lemmings” - they do also have them on Genes Reunited.

That says it all about Ancestry and the amateurs on there doesn't it! Help.........

Overall the matching has been very usefull.

Even if people make huge blunders in their tree, they still often have information that provides vital clues.

MarkCDodd wrote:Overall the matching has been very usefull.

Even if people make huge blunders in their tree, they still often have information that provides vital clues.

I like the hints overall, it's just a case of treading carefully, and double checking everything.
I quite often find that in other people's trees there aren't any references to the source info. If it's only on one tree then I have written to the tree owner to ask where they got the info from so I can check it myself. But if it's on loads of trees this is difficult as a lot of them have just copied it from someone else's tree. I only tend to look at other peoples trees when I've reached a dead end, and usually they don't tell me more that I know already!

Sorry to bring this thread back again... But I have to laugh because back when I started I made a massive error with my tree on the Bruce line.

I added in a whole other tree where the father was born AFTER the son. I felt so proud I had gone so far back, then I looked at it and realised the problem. That tree is still on ancestry somewhere but I can't remember my u/n and p/w for the life of me so it'll stay there. My Auntie also has the same mistake on her tree and hasn't corrected it despite me telling her time after time that it's incorrect.

I have less than 600 people on my tree. Not everything is verified but what is verified I have verified myself. I haven't got the time or the money to verify individual descendants of my ancestors so have inputted on a best guess and said so on my home page (maybe I should add that into everyone who isn't verified).

I could even be barking up the wrong tree with half of my ancestors but slowly I'm gathering all the information eeded to verify them.

It's very easy on ancestry just to copy what someone else has on their tree, so it's worth being careful. I tend not to add from other peoples trees directly - but I do use them as a stepping stone if I'm stuck. A lot of the names on peoples trees have no documentation to back them up, so they could be made up really!
A few times I've emailed people to find out where they got their info, but mostly they reply that they got it from someone elses tree!
It's a good idea to say what you've verified, and what you haven't. For a while I had two trees, one of which was private that I used for the stuff I hadn't got around to verifying.