Genealogy Chat

I guess I have been lucky, I haven't had this happen to me, but then I rarely open my tree to anyone


However, this evening, I was working on ancestry trying to find information on some of my so-far untraced ancestors.

I have a very small tree on there .......... my great grandparents, one great aunt and her husband

I found someone had taken the gr grandparents because the name of their son-in-law J W matched a male that he had in his family

He then had Sarah as the wife of JW ........ my JW's wife was Hannah, but that was ignored

The problem was .................... his J W and his Sarah were both born in 1770 which is waaaaaaaaaay before even my gr grandparents were born

I have to agree that both J W's apparently died in New Jersey, but his had children, mine did not


You do have to laugh don't you?!!


Oh yes ......... the tree owner had somehow made himself incommunicado to receiving emails (even though it was a public tree), so I can't tell him what a twit he is! Or at least I couldn't find how to do it.


sylvia
roflol'ing

I was told that once Ancestry have your tree that they own the copyright.
so I suppose it's up to us how much we publish.on there.

Theres an awful lot of misinformation on there!

well, he's certainly got misinformation in his tree ....... and he put it there!

And GR has copyright of whatever is put on this site, too, including all the Donald Ducks :-)

Maybe you should start a new branch Sylvia, with Andy Pandy and Looby Lou on it and see it he takes that too!! :):):)

Hi all,

I have a relation on ancestry who is fairly new to researching her tree and therefore has added every single person she has come across with the same surname as the family she is researching!

I have tried to point out to her that most of her 800 odd people are not correct; our gt gt grandfather is called Thomas - i have found this on the marriage record of our gt grandfather - she has him on ancestry as Patrick!

Claire

I don't have my tree on Ancestry, however while browsing my family names, I found someone with my grandmother and her parents, siblings etc.

On searching this tree, it was apparent the tree owner had added my family to hers even althought there is no connection whatsoever.

She must have assumed they belonged ... from a shared name on a census perhaps.

I wrote to her and pointed out there was no connection and even gave another name as proof so she could check it out.

What does she do ?

Not only does she not delete the misinformation, she adds the 'extra' name I sent to her entirely wrong tree.

You can't win ! and knowing my granny, she would not have been pleased to find herself attatched to strangers. She had enough strange people in her own family to contend with.

What you could do...depends on how annoyed you are is make a comment on their tree that others can see; stating that your family is not connected. I've made corrections to other trees that have the wrong info in them. : )

n

I sent a brief precis about my grandfather to a newly found cousin. Unfortunately she cut and pasted it and it is now on ancestry. Whilst checking I noted someone else had attatched this info to their tree.
I contacted to see what relation they were, thinking they would be close 22,000 people later, I could not find where the link was. To their credit the tree owner did open their tree to me.
Now, I have quite aa good online chat with this cousin but I am a bit worried about what info may be uploaded. I have done a resume of the living members of my branch of the family but am now unsure whether to send her this. I probably will with a request not to upload the info.

I did add comments to the people on this tree that my gt grandparents had no connection with his JW ................. especially as there was 100 years between his birthdate and theirs!

Thanks for that suggestion, Claire




sylvia

I have found my family tree has been hi-jacked by two people on Ancestry. One in Austrailia and one in the USA. They both have 6 or 8 thousand names on their trees, but I wonder how many of their names have also been collected in the same way. One thing that made me smile was the fact that on the american site all my ancesters apparently travelled to the USA to die. What satisfaction do these people get from just collecting names ?
Cheers, Maureen.

I have had my tree on GR for about 3 years now and it's open to quite a few people. I have started getting a lot of "hot matches" that are obviously 2nd and 3rd hand copies taken from my tree.

I guess it's not stealing because I opened my tree to share, but I do wonder why people will blindly copy a tree without confirming whether the information is correct or not?

I find it quite funny when I contact somebody about a shared relative and they have no idea where the information came from.

A lot of you mention Ancestry when remarking about "stealing".
I do not use their tree for my main family but I have read some of the information and it seems that the site is designed to share.
OneWorldTree was created to let Ancestry members benefit from the combined research efforts of the community. Even so, your personal identity always remains private unless you choose to share it with other Ancestry members on your own.

OneWorldTree takes family trees submitted by Ancestry members and "stitches" them together with family trees and historical records from other sources. OneWorldTree identifies probable name matches between these sources and displays consolidated results in a worldwide family tree that can help you with your family history research.