Genealogy Chat

Am I the only one receiving mail from other GR members answering questions on people in their tree that I've supposed to have requested? I have not written to any one seeking information for months. I have only recently re uploaded my file to GR from FTM 2005 and I can see quite a few irregularities with the transfer of the data. Is any one else experiencing these problems ?

There have been one or two threads where people have noticed that they seem to be getting ''replies'' from people - probably not realising that HotMatches are generated by GR and aren't individual requests. Christine

Hi Graham, I know what you mean - I've had some of these. They are not hot matches. They are actual messages from individuals saying something like 'my John Smith was born in xxx, so we don't have a match' - exactly as you say, as if answering a request for info, but no request has been made. It's very odd..... Victoria.

I had one today..........some bloke who'd had a hot match for Mary Unknown...........his message to me............'sorry all mine were born in Scotland' The sooner GR sorts out the farce they call 'Hot matches' the better it will be. I've blocked them..........just can't be bothered with all the dross. Reg

I got a letter off a contact about a year ago which established contact with a member with my grandad's side of the tree the other day I got an e-mail from him saying that he doesn't have any Bache's in his tree - members of my nan's side of the tree. But i didn't even send a e-mail asking about that side of the tree - in fact i hadn't emailed him in about 6 months!

These phantom requests are replies to Hot Matches because they think the tree owner has sent them out rather than GR! I have had several of these and started a thread about it a week or so ago. I just wish GR would somehow make it clear that these Hot Matches come from them and not the tree owner. Some GR users go through every hot match and respond to each one whether there is a match or not!!!! They wouldn't do that if they got over 5 pages of the bally things as I do!!! Cheers, Horatia

Thanks to you all for responding . I can see that it is more than likely the Hot Matches that is causing these replies.I've just spent an age going through and deleting all of these so called Hot Matches. The only way I could see of doing that was to tick all of the boxes on each page and then press the discard button. At least I was not receiving replies about my 'unknowns' like Reggie.

Graham, I have also had problems tranfering data from FTM to GR. Somewhere along the line, it seems to get mangled!

I think the 'mangling' (is that a word) is because of the way that dates are entered into FTM, it's different to GR. If you go though and change them from say 10 Dec 1911 to 10/12/1911, it sorts itself out.

hiya, just a thought, perhaps its something to do with the fact that you have re-uploaded from FTM to GR, as this resets all hotmatching (or so i'm lead to believe) so even though you havent really contacted these people in ages, the 'system' doesnt see it like that, i may be talking utter rubbish mind, but it does seem feasable to me Julie

I had a message yesterday saying 'sorry I can't give you any more information except that he had 10 children'. I didn't know what he was talking about, because I hadn't sent any messages, and was clearly not the same person as in my tree as he was born in a completely different place. So how are these messages being sent?

The sender receives Hot Matches (as most of us do). They mistakenly think the tree owners have sent them the Hot Matches and they reply from the hot matches to the tree owners not realising it is GR who sends out Hot Matches and not the tree owners! It's called not bothering to read the website properly! ;-) They reply even if the Hot matches don't match - waste of time or what???!!! Cheers, Horatia

I did receive a reply from GR concerning my complaint about these 'replies' Their response 'please bear with us while we work to resolve this' Which would indicate to me that they are aware of the problem and if we all keep on their back they may make it a priority...ha! ha!

Graham, That is good news! These phantom replies are getting me down! It took GR long enough to offer an option to hide living relatives. Hopefully this should be easier to rectify???!!! Cheers, Horatia