General Chat

I would love to meet some of the workers of the Ancestry site to tell them what I think of their 'add hint' system.

Huia.

Hijack away, take it, it's yours! Make me go away and work, in fact. ;)

(Aside whilst we hijack JC's thread)

I will do that LA
Thankyou for the tip.

Must try to meet up whle I am unable to work.

Well Lady Augusta you can heave a sigh of relief that this is OH's tree.

Got a message from them the other day

Said hello cousin

Nearly choked on my muesli.

They did not like my comments so think I will add some more.

Tracey reckons I am the missing link.

Oops, I wandered off to do some overdue work and neglected this thread!


Here I am, Jill! And Hello all you rest! Overworked and underslept ... slept til almost noon today, aahhh.


I love the tales of messed-up ancestors at Ancestry. ;) Anybody else found their grx ... a lot ... grfather in Cheshire being the grandson of a man born 250 years later in the US colonies? (Do that math now ... I think it's the New Math!)


LK, I do believe you are trying to commit death by prose in that comment! (The comments form doesn't allow for paragraphing, does it? ;) )

Okay, now I'm hooked. Shall I try to follow down from Gaia Mother Earth to your expropriated ancestor? Point me in the right direction, though: do you descend from Aphrodite, or Kyklopes ... ?


Irene, it may be a case of genealogy karma, or "what goes around comes around".

You may need to steal someone else's ancestor first to start the ball rolling. Now, who wouldn't want a member of the Dragoon Guards in their tree??

As long as it wasn't mine. ;)

I've already been suspicious that the Mr X who married in the early 20s wasn't my grf's father, a widower of 55ish, marrying a much younger woman (and having two kids), but my grf committing bigamy (being already married to my grm) while his wife was at home in Northamptonshire not knowing where he was (yes, I need to get that certificate ...) until he showed up and dragged her off to Canada. Now I'm wondering what he might have got up to in that decade+ in the military before marrying my grm ... a long time to be a soldier and not married ...

Well I am sulking --- and deciding whether to continue with my research or not

No one has ever taken bits of my family and added them to theirs -- or given my Ancestors strange marriages to siblings -- or have I seen any of our children born before their parents --

So am I to assume my family and their tree is not good enough to nick

How very dare they !!!

If you would like to roll on the floor laughing

http://trees.ancestry.co.uk/tree/5333399/person/689159283

Tree name SheRob44
view my comments re my ancestor she has nicked.
She did not even get her own grandmother right and I have tried to help
Then look at the profile where she says she her skills are advanced

then flick through names on the tree

especially check this one out

http://trees.ancestry.co.uk/tree/5333399/person/-1107436589

I have a tree on Ancestry and like all other sites I only
believe what I can verify for myself. I have seen the errors
in others trees and some seem to follow on regardless.
Like most people I learnt the hard way by taking all as
gospel, now I know better. Am happy to be told if I have
errors in my tree and will double check, nine times out
of ten I have certificates to prove my findings,am willing
to point anyone in the right direction with photocopies of
certs but some will not accept the proof in black and white.

Emmax

Good to see you back Janey - I was worried about you!

Jill

(who has a tree on Ancestry and despairs of some of the errors seen in other trees ...)

Well Janey,according to them you,re a "Wise Old Bird" hope you,re keeping well.**M**.:o))>.

I know how you feel about trees on Ancestry, Janey. According to about 100 trees my parents had their first daughter b in Ireland in about 1725. Quite remarkable when you consider the fact that quite a few of these trees had dad correctly named and b in 1899 and mum correctly named. I am not sure how they managed to have a daughter b in 1725. She even died in 1815, before her dad was born! And our parents never set foot outside of New Zealand so the stork was a wee bit astray.

Some of the tree owners have corrected their trees, others have merely removed our parents names, so my sister is still there b 1725, d 1815. And there are still people hitting the 'Add hint' button without checking. One person said she adds things then sets out to prove or disprove it. Another insisted that her tree was correct because the information was in so many other trees.

GRRRR.

Huia.

Janey and Majery

Two very interesting postings. I haven't added to my tree on Ancestry for a while but when i last looked I now have about 5 threads all starting with the same name. I am also very concerned about the number of names which i do not recall having put on my tree.
GR was the first provider I used and then heard about Ancestry and I have found it quite helpful to have two places to go to from time to time too check some information but having now retired I must make a choice as to which provider to go with and I think that I shall stay with GR I am lucky rny grandparents who were born in in the 1880s already had quite a few family certs all originals and I used them as my starting point.

Well as it is only 5.45 am where I live I will sign off now but will be back later today to see if there is any more interesting reading on here.

B

Keeping up with who's messing up one's ancestors (and closer rellies) on the internet could be a full-time job!

I've just had a delightful contact from someone via Ancestry -- I do put loads of info in corrections to censuses e.g., just not such as would come down into the 20th century and identify me and my family -- who had put in much of the same work, and come up with most of the same answers, as I have about one line of mine.

So refreshing! He's not saying our mutual grx2 grandfather was the son of Thomas just because Ancestry says so! while I know of a half-dozen others, some as directly related and some not, who have just said "oh yes please" and adopted Thomas into their tree. Thomas's son by the same name as our ancestor was somebody else's ancestor altogether. (I've confirmed his autonomous existence with one of his descendants here at GR.)

How rude just to expropriate him! And how annoying to have my ancestor's ancestry messed up like this in cyberspace where it all goes round and round lives forever.

So the family in question is my brothers' direct male line (mine too of course, but I don't get the old Y chromosome), which I have back to the grx4 grandparents, and so does this new cousin, who is also a direct male line descendant . And the genes have outed all over the tree. Oh, the alcoholics and gamblers. My dad (who died 8 years ago next month) gets full marks for bucking the trend and stopping it there, as do my new cousin and his brother.

I just figured out a bit of a mystery about that grandfather of mine today. Why he was in WWI and got his battlefield commission under a fake name, and only applied years later to have his medals reissued in his real name.

Well. Signed on with the Dragoon Guards in the early 1900s, aged 18 yrs 2 mo. Except he wasn't. He was barely 15. And before he was 17, he had been discharged *with ignominy*! Can't tell what for exactly, but I'll bet he was drunk when he did it. And he didn't lack nerve. By 1911 he was back in the Dragoon Guards under the fake name. ;)

So yes -- genuine rellies with a genuine interest making a genuine effort (apart from immediate family and first cousins and such) -- those are who get info shared with them. Most certainly not the general public without even so much as a by your leave!

I have to get back to my new cousin and boast that I'm the only one so far to find who our grx3 grandmother is, and share my excellent theory that it was our little family from a little English village who populated a bit of New England in the 1600s (while our own branch stayed in England) -- the same bit he totally coincidentally lives in now -- and not the unrelated brothers by the same name from some other part of England (variously described as Essex, Sussex and the Isle of something or other) that a bunch of very sloppy "researchers" in the US have adopted as their own. ;)

Now -- go back to Ancestry and make sure it hasn't set up a new tree for you behind your back!

Thanks for your suggestion Janey C.

I have deleted my tree on ancestry and on here for the same sort of reason.
I thought it was all private and took the precaution of not having living rellies and putting no interesting family facts on as well. Just had bare facts.

Then I thought I'd try a few free family history programmes to see which one was the easiest.
Didn't like and deleted PAF and Legacy. Put my parents and grandparents on My Heritage to see how it looked and

Lo and Behold the next thing is I started getting Hot Matches.

I immediately deleted the whole thing and thought that was that.

The other day I get an Email from My Heritage to tell me that they had found two other researschers researching my family.

Out of curiosity I looked them up. One was a fifth generation descendant of my grandmother's eldest sister. My grandmother was the youngest of six children all born in New Zealand so this person was not related to me and I suspected from his name that he was a person of native origin to put it delicately..

Worse than that he had uplifted all my father's Scottish forbears and all of my mother's English family going back to the 18th Century.

These people were in no way remotely connected to him by any stretch of the imagination. I Emailed My Heritage and told them to remove my family from this unrelated person's tree which I doubt that they will do. That is when I deleted my tree (I hope) completely from Ancestry and I have done the same here. I am under a false name on here with no family whatsoever.
I will tell anyone anything they want to know if they are related but I am not having strangers borrowing my tree without permission just to enlarge theirs.

We've all seen the nonsense in Ancestry trees.

My grx4 grfather, the parish clerk who was hatched, matched and despatched in Cornwall (and "a worthy man", says his burial record in the parish records ... which I suspect he wrote himself ... ;) ) in the 1700s -- he had a son who was born, married and died in Tennessee, yes he did. According to 4 or 5 trees at Ancestry.

You know. Somebody got a "hint" and took it, because they've seen the television commercials, they know that all you have to do is pay your money and type in a name and bingo, instant family tree back to the Conquest, or the Mayflower, or the War of 1812 (in the ads we Canucks get).

Well. I just clicked on somebody's profile there to get info about a query on TTF. And Ancestry invited me to review my profile. So I did.

Now, let's say my username at Ancestry is jac_jac -- for Janey Anastasia Canuck. Just like here, I don't use my real name publicly. So far so good.

So I go to my profile, and I discover that I have a public tree at Ancestry! And that there are three names in that tree. And it is called the Canuck (jac_jac) tree. So I click on it. And the only name there is mine: Janey Canuck. The name I had carefully NOT made available through my username or profile at Ancestry.

I don't know how long that's been there or how many people have had the pleasure of meeting me through my secret (only to myself) family tree at Ancestry.

Ancestry has just received a rather loud message from me. I'm looking forward to hearing about the legal opinion they obtained before they smeared my identity around the internet without my knowledge, let alone my consent.

Anyway, I figured I'd go search for myself in trees at Ancestry, since I seemed to be there. But since I didn't have a birthdate or place, that was too much hassle. I fixed "my" tree to make myself anonymous again, putting in my username instead of my real name.

Well, wouldn't ya know it. Ancestry had a hint for me right away!

It appears that I am Jayne Jalc Jalc Canook (shall we say) -- born in 1867! How perfect; Janey Canuck was born the same year as Canada was. ;)


I've just gone through about 15 steps to make "my" tree private, remove my name from it, remove my name from the name of the tree, remove my name from the description of the tree, block it from all searches ... I could have just deleted it, but who knows, one day I may want a tree there ... and if I delete it, Ancestry might just decide to make one for me anyhow!


Now, as a reminder for anyone who hasn't done it ... go to your account here ("My account") and remove your given name, your birth surname, your present surname ... all your identifying details...

Because anyone who pays whatever the minimum membership is here these days can get all that info just by clicking on your user name and sending you a PM. And then they can look up your birth, your marriage, your whereabouts ... and really, who needs anybody doing that?

Anybody with Ancestry might want to go check out their profile there too.


Oh, and -- I'm here for a good time but not a long time! Thanks to those who've PMed to check up on me -- the eye infection is all gone, the feral kittens have turned out to be both female, quite a surprise (possibly to Spud the "boy" herself, who is currently in heat, what fun; not to worry, they don't go outside), and it's %$#@ing cold here. Work keeps threatening to suffocate me and I must be disciplined. Mid-March might bring some relief. ;)