Barking up the wrong tree

[Pinefamily]

Feeling the need to vent some frustration.
You would think that after 40 or so years of research (on and off), I would be more careful in checking every fact thoroughly. And learn not to fully trust the big two's indexing algorithms.
Using FMP's Devon resources, I was able to find a marriage for my ancestor John Harris of Hennock to Elizabeth Comynge (sic) in Bishopsteignton. So far so good. I worked out that Comynge was actually Comyns, and FMP clumped Comynge and variants separately to Comyns and variants. I made great headway with tracing the Comyns family, or so I thought.
Last night I accidentally left off the "e" from a Comynge search, and discovered that there were different results again. As a result, I discovered that the Elizabeth Comynge I had found a baptism for, was buried a year later. Back to the drawing board for me.
The lesson learned? Look through the images instead of relying on the indexing.

[Janet]

Barking up the wrong tree

A thread title to strike fear into the hearts of the likes of us. Methinks you're not alone. :rolleyes:

[Macbev]

It is so easy to tree the wrong family.

Did it myself when I grafted a whole batch of Ryans into my grandmother's family. In my defense, my father was closely associated with several of these 'other' Ryans and there were photos of them all socialising as young people. Small wonder I assumed they were some of his cousins.
Pity I had to prune them out when I finally discovered my error

[Phoenix]

It is so frustrating to discover that the algorithms miss some of the variants.

My Poling ancestors appear in registers as Pullen, Polling and Poulden. The IGI in the eighties organised them in no fewer than three different places, so it is very easy to miss them, and sometimes impossible to be sure that you are looking at the same family.

I think we have all been there, missing the infant burial or the second marriage. And I have several branches where the current single solution feels wrong, even if I cannot find a better one.

[ElizabethHerts]

Something similar happened in my tree.

Researchers of our Quintrell family had long allocated the parents of our ancestor Thomas Quintrell before I began researching, with the father being Richard of Gerrans, Cornwall.

However, when I started researching I wanted to check everything myself and I was in contact with another researcher. We soon discovered that this Thomas died in 1720, a year after his baptism. Back to the drawing board!

We discovered that an Edward Quintrell from Gerrans had settled at St Agnes and had children baptised there. Our Thomas was baptised in 1718. When Thomas married he named one of his sons Edward, and none was Richard.

There are still trees with the wrong baptism circulating.

[Olde Crone]

Kill 'em off first, is what a very useful old chap in the records office told me many years ago, when I was groping around with no clue what I was doing. He also told me that family history research is "10% luck, 90% look" and how right that has been.

I do sometimes think that the old research methods, pre internet, were better in some ways. Trudging through every page of a church register often prompted connections you wouldn't have made otherwise (because you don't know what you don't know) and in a surprising number of cases, deaths of small children were noted against their baptisms.

I had three candidates for my John Green born in the early 1700s. I simply could not separate these three men and two of them appeared to have married the same woman but 45 years apart. It only became crystal clear when I looked at the church register, at the back of which was a handy list of who owned which graves. John Green was but one man, married three times, wife one and three having the same names but were aunt and niece. The order in which his 19 (!) children and their mothers were buried between four graves, gave the time line and sorted very long standing mystery. That information is still not on line, as far as I know.

OC

[Kit]

I had a small wrong branch in my tree and was very upset when I discovered I had the wrong second marriage. I'd grown rather fond of the daughter of the marriage who looked to have had a hard life. I felt like I was abandoning her too.