Interesting.

[ElizabethHerts]

I stumbled across this video from a series called "Setting the record straight".
This episode talks about misinformation in online family trees and how errors arising from copying the incorrect information occurred long before the advent of the Internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIOcGzdhmUc

The example he gives resonates with me.

For a long time, many trees (pre-Internet) allocated the incorrect parents to my 5x-great-grandfather, Thomas Quintrell. Another researcher and I almost simultaneously discovered the truth. The Thomas Quintrell whose baptism this assumption had been based on was buried shortly after his birth. Nobody had noticed this mistake and the incorrect information spread amongst Quintrell descendants.

We were then able to ascertain that the parents of our Thomas were Edward and Mary and were not at Edward's home parish of Gerrans but at St Agnes (Cornwall). The family later returned to Gerrans. Our Thomas indeed had children of his own named Edward and Mary.

Many incorrect trees still exist.


There is a series of videos that I might watch.

[Olde Crone]

Thank you Elizabeth, I shall watch that later.

Most of the official biographies and trees for the Holden family state that the founding family were the de Haldanes who came over with William the Conqueror. This is simply not true and is easily disproved by any amateur researcher. The coats of arms were and still are completely different, the de Haldanes never held land in Lancashire and the Holdens were well entrenched in Lancashire long before the Norman invasion. Just try telling anyone though!

OC

[Katarzyna]

I had an interesting and very insightful email today from FHF which covers this very subject.

The main article by Nick Barrett "Through the Mists of Time—Searching for English Ancestors" Love NB'

Also a DNA article by Martin Mc Dowell "Segments Are Pure Gold"

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=244e8be0a2&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-f:1783473902902554729&th=18c02c10c0afb069&view=att&disp=inline&realattid=q_07acd8

[kiterunner]

Your link just takes me to Gmail, Kat. I tried looking up the Family History Federation Really Useful Bulletin for December but it doesn't seem to include the articles that you mention, as far as I can see.

[Katarzyna]

Sorry about that. I can't see a way to download it probably because it's a subscription. I only received it today - the 4th issue of the month.
The article is from November 2023 No 39

[kiterunner]

Okay, thanks, I've found it in my emails. (Sorry to say that I have had loads of their emails but never bothered to download the newsletter before.) For some reason they don't seem to have all editions on their website.

[marquette]

Regarding incorrect information from pre-internet days. Many years ago, part of my husbands family was divided by a name change.

The Hargreaves side of the family picked up a birth in the English indexes and decided this man came out to Australia, and somewhere along the line, one of the family changed their name to Sanderson.

The Sanderson side believed the opposite, that a Sanderson changed his name to Hargreaves.

What the Hargreaves side missed was a death entry for that child, a few months later, which was picked up by a Sanderson researcher.

All was revealed when DNA testing became widely available, when DNA matches were made across several families.

I think I have told this story before, when the DNA researchers were threatened with legal action by the Hargreaves if they published "such nonsense" as "the DNA must be wrong". Those people will never correct their trees, as they don't believe there are any errors.

[Phoenix]

Mistakes were inevitably so much easier in pre Internet days. I have filled in the gaps of victorian researchers who were clever detailed and meticulous but didn't have access to the host of resources we do.

[Olde Crone]

Yes, there were some clever Victorian researchers. There were also many outright frauds! My great grandfather had a family tree drawn up, it was nothing more than a vanity tree but he and subsequent generations believed every word because it was done by a "professional" .

OC

[Phoenix]

An "expert" at a family history fair told Best Mate she would never find her missing Lanning marriage. And she believed them. I asked the good folk on this site to look. They found the marriage. Lots of incidental detail proved it wasn't coincidentally the right name and DNA confirmed it.

Apparently, on Genes Reunited, when few censuses were readily available, one member did lookups... and MADE UP THE RESULTS. The urge to do stuff for the money or for the kudos must sometimes be too great to resist.

[Olde Crone]

And what about the Heralds Visitations then. I saw two of these, one for each brother, they were different! Burkes Peerage is another self reported opportunity for "error".

OC

[Phoenix]

I don't think the heralds did any research themselves, they asked the family questions. Some people misremembered, and others left out what was unimportant to them.
I've got a family where the maternal grandmother was clearly known as Granny Brown because her first husband had died many years ago and she had remarried quite quickly to William Brown. So her daughter, who had died very young, must have been a Brown. Had she never remarried, they would have known she was actually Granny Smith. It took a researcher several hundred years later, who understood heraldry, to examine the tomb of the daughter and spot the error.

[Olde Crone]

No, I didn't mean the heralds were guilty of poor research, I meant that people accept(ed) the Visitations as gospel, not understanding that they were self reported.

OC

[Anstey Nomad]

And Joseph Bodycote died in Nottingham in 1858. Almost every online tree says this. A small investment shows that the Joseph who died in Nottingham was three years old and in fact the grandson of the other Joseph, who had died in Philadelphia in 1857!

Then of course Joseph senior had three sons: Charles, Robert and Henry ... or not as the case may be.