Genealogy Chat

nudge

Excuse me for being a bit slow but what is City arc?

Hi, i had some one open their tree to me a while back and i was hugely concerned that his tree was excessively large.....so i asked him why he had so many people....people that seemed to have no link. He replied honestly that he had made some mistakes in believing peoples research rather than backing it up with his own and had added thousands of people until recently when he realised it could not be right. I actually felt sorry for him because having helped my sister in law yesterday i have seen how some people get so over excited about finding their famillies that they dont think logically about links. i had to hand my sister in law a pen and tell her to write it rather than add people so i could fix it once she had left. I think i ask alot of people but thats not saying i want people to research for me but usually a hand to point me in the right direction as i am fairly new to this. I have less than 300 people in my tree and it has taken many many hours of search and alot of hard work as well as some incredible people being willing to point me to the right path and in some instances have a quick browse through for me too. I think it just shows that some people are misguided not name collectors.
Lou x

Sue - This is such an interesting read. It really is a breath of fresh air - Well done everyone who's contributed.

:o)

H

City Arc is the archives site for the Medway area in Kent. It is very useful for all sorts of records.

It's spelt CityArk by the way - funny, clunky site but will save you a fortune if you have Medway/Gravesend rellies.

J

n

Nudging up because it is of a similar theme to the Tree Bandits thread

I too research well on the people in my tree, it makes them alive in my mind. I do find out lots, mostly about the direct persons, but if i come across a bunch of siblings to a Gt Gt Gt someone i do add them in and try and find their marrages and children. I put in their husbands, but i may not look at this husband in the same way, he is actually nothing to do with me is he? His line back is completly seperate. Everyone looks at their research differently and if they wish just the main trunk then who is to say thats wrong, again if someone wants the branches and the sprits then that too is ok. My tree is only young, many have helped me on here and i too have had the great fortune to find someone who has done a lot of work, all on my main line back to 1545! Am i wrong to note it and add it in when i am 100% sure its correct. I added it and am now busy looking for the graves and records of these people to have in my file to pass on to my children and theirs.
Whats so wrong with that. I have also shared certificates and pictures with others that are linked.

Jackie

Nothing wrong with that at all Jackie.

If someone shows me a new branch for my tree I tend to be a bit sceptical until I've done what checking I can. I've seen rather a lot of online trees which are works of fiction so I like to find out a bit about the person who created the tree and where they found their information.

More and more information is coming online but still many areas of the UK are not well recorded on the Internet. If someone has been able to get to a Records Office and discovered a document that relates to my ancestors, and is happy to share, then I am happy to be shown that information. Life is probably going to be far too short to visit all relevant Records Offices to research every bit of my tree or go over every detail with a fine tooth comb.

I have a second cousin who has concentrated on one part of our shared ancestry. That bit has become her particular interest and she shares her findings. I know she is thorough and there is no point in doing it all again myself.

Having said all that, I do remember best the parts of the tree which I have spent time and effort on researching myself and there are some ancestors who seem more real to me than others.

I get really very interested in the lives of some ancestors and find out as much about their jobs, where they lived and what sort of lives they lived. Even if they lived a very long time ago, and I know I share them with many thousands of other descendants, it still gives me a little shiver down my spine to think if they hadn't lived I wouldn't be here.

Last week one of my contacts visited a chapel and sent me a photo of a tomb of one of my ancestors (one of my 10x greats). He and his 3rd wife (I am descended from the 2nd) are shown as effigies lying with a monkey at their feet. The chapel guide explained that the monkey commemorates a pet one which woke the family when there was a house fire and saved their lives.
I like finding out snippets like that and it all makes people even from long ago come to life.

Sue

Hi everyone
Been reading through this thread, very interesting.
I've only been doing my tree for 8 months but I got a good match with a distant cousin who was related to my grandmothers family which gave me a very good start. we were able to exchange stories from our grandmothers and she has photos of my g aunts and my nan.
The Medway cityark is a good site if your're looking for relies in Noth Kent. I found lots dating from the late 1800s. My family moved to the medway area from Canterbury and Maidstone. Many were ag labs so they moved to where the work was I s'pose. Its a pity other places havent got something like cityark. I live in Hertfordshire so making a trip to Canterbury etc is difficult to fit round work and family

Yvonne x

Hi

There are some very good points made in this thread.

I am a combination of many things when it comes to my family tree. I have a small tree where I know that everything is certain, this is accompanied by my family history and these are the ancestors that I feel I know.
Then I have my wider tree this is where I record siblings and so forth that I may never get the certificates to prove. This is also the place where I make note of my maybes and most likelies until I can prove my theories.
I also have two further trees that record the occurances of a couple of the more unusual names in my tree in the immediate areas that I am concerned with so should I ever find the link between my tree and them I will not have to go back over ground that I covered years before.

Finally I have my tree on here. This is a selection of the proven along with some of the theories all there because they will hopefully let me link with other researchers interested in the same lines.

I have been a 'victim' of a name collector by proxy. I was contacted by someone with a very tenous link to my family and declined to let them see my tree however some time later they contacted a genuine relative of mine who had been given access to my tree who in turn passed the information on. I know this because I appeared in the first persons tree. The ironic thing is that the genuine relative closed their tree to me after I pointed out some inaccuracies, mainly that they were missing a sibling of my father's, so even if the 'name collector' is geniune in their desire to know more they are getting flawed information.

For my part when I do get information from other researchers I like to check it myself just in case, I've made fundemental errors in the past and so I'd like any flaws in my research to be my own and not anyone elses.

Sarah

Nudge

nudge

Hello All,

I made contact with someone recently who had 19,000
names on their tree, and I had a couple of hot matches. i was a bit dubious because of the amount of names he had and the fact that he had my grandparents on it. However, looking at the tree, his connection to me is very teneuous BUT he has given me 4 generations (with all source notes given) of my grandmothers ancestors, street names matching up with my info. He may be doing a cluster research and I am grateful that he is! I have no problems opening my tree to him, even if he puts down people on my mother's side that he has no direct link to. Its a case of where do you draw the line? Do you put down every single name connected to you or do you concentrate purely on blood relatives?

If this gentleman didn't have 19,000 names on his tree, I doubt wether i would've got this info.

Carole x

ps after 2 days examining the notes on his tree, and searching on the census records and the I.G.I, Ive found out a lot of new things, including that 2 sisters married 2 brothers, which I don't think he's realised.

hi all
i don't see a problem with anyone wanting to add as many names as they can to their tree, as long as its well researched. Sometimes during my own research i've come across information that may not be directly connected to my direct blood relatives . i add this information because i know it will be helpful to someone in the future who may need it.
I'm amazed how anyone can get as far as 19,000 names though! i've only got about 570

regards
shelly

Yes, I dont name collect but I will research the employer or friend of an ancestor if it helps knock down a brick wall.

I have a logical mind, and many of my theories have turned out to be the truth. Examples is:

In 1871, my East End residing 7 year old 2xgreat gran's birthplace was given as Sussex, yet in later censuses it was given as London, Stoke Newington. But they were in Bow at that time and I had a theory that maybe they moved to Stoke Newington from Sussex, lived there for a short while then moved to Bow. True as that was.

My ggggran was in Oxford in 1861 as a servant with her employer. She was in London in 1866. I wondered if she moved there with her boss in about 1862. I found they did as her boss got married in London in 1863.

I wonder if the girlfriends of married men got pregnant purposely to win their husband if their wife was ill or something?

Ben

nudge

Carole & Sue From Up North

It is a good thing that your informant put references on but... One of the people who has rellies on a big tree on this site [i would describe him a more a collector of names than a tree bandit] has a web site which looks brilliant, has all the right data base references - what it doesn't say is where he got the original tree data from. I am well aware that he was supplied with researched trees going back over 300 years plus bolted on the more recent stuff which was supplied to him. He e-mailed me with a 'have a look at my wonderful web site' message, I looked, was impressed and went back to him to offer congratulations as to how long it must have taken. His reply was along the lines of it wasn't more than a few days. I would speculate what he did was take the people's trees, then look up the references and then add them to his mega tree. In many ways there isn't a technical problem as long as he is acurate but is it morally right that he did not credit the original researchers who actually did all the hard work?

flo

Nudge