Genealogy Chat

OC - are we supposed to look for proof that these events took place!!!!!! Isn´t it good enough that great aunt Mabel told me so!! LOL!!

Paul I have also entered stuff on Lost Cousins - you do realise that you dont have to enter ALL the guff over and over again, just the head of the household, then there is some sort of repeat button (gosh, wasnt THAT a helpful bit of advice for you?) Copyright problems mean that LC can only let you enter from the 1881 census, which is sadly limiting. By 'proof' I was thinking more of certs, baptismal enties etc. If you said Joe Bloggs married Sally Smith, then you ought to have to prove it, either by a cert, or at least a definite date and place of marriage. Dream on, olde crone.

When I first started on-line geneological research. I found someone had added my grandmother to one-world tree. I managed to contact the submitter and found it was someone tracing the familes of men who had worked in the somerset coalfields. He has a massive data base of about 40,000 names all backed by parish records and census records. This took me back several generations. I have also found quite a lot of other family members on there recorded with various degrees of accuracy. I contacted an american member who had married my great granmother to her brother-in-law and he corrected the information. If you add your tree ancestry let you see any matching information so it might be worth doing to see if the family has already been researched. However there is no guarantee that you will be able to contact the submitter or they will answer. You still have to pay to see any non-matching information which seems mean. You can remove your tree at any time. I have never been contacted by anyone else through ancestry. I would not include any personal details or details of living relatives as it is public. Probably particularly useful if you know you have family members who emigrated to America but I now have too much personal information on my ftm tree to submit an update. Anne

OC, Lost Cousins is an example I believe of a site that requires proof, ie 1891 (I think) census reference. From what I hear it is not working too well, due to the need for proof as well as the very tedious method of entering new 'cousins'. I always have a good laugh at some of the entries I see, the people who submit them probably laugh about it as well - at least I hope they do. Paul

Oh Paul, I entirely agree - there is rubbish EVERYWHERE you look, in genealogy. I would love to see someone start a proper, serious site, where you could only enter proven info on your tree but suspect it would be very undersubscribed, LOL. OC

I have my tree on Ancestry and RootsWeb and have found both to be valuable tools. Also the GEDCOM import function always works plus both have (they are linked) some very useful reporting tools. In my experience there is just as much 'rubbish' on GR as there is on the others, although RootsWeb probably has more as it has been going for many years and is FREE. There are some massive trees, over 250,000 individuals, there. As an example I have the surname Windsor in my tree - nothing to do with the royal ones. My GR new names has just thrown up several entries of the royal Windsors!! Paul

Oh dear. I had someone contact me from this Site (don't know how my details got on there, but that's another story). He had paid a Profesional Researcher to 'do' the Holdens and had a wealth of information which had taken him 40 years to compile, so I was very excited to receive a CD with all this wonderful stuff in it. Oh dear. 'John Holden was born in Darwen, Lancs, baptised 3rd May in 1699 and his father was John Holden' Er - the John Holden baptised 3rd May has father given as JAMES Holden if you look at the PR. OK, sorry, typo, he may not be the one bap 3rd May. In that case, there are at least 30 John Holdens to consider over a period of ten years. There were wild errors of translation on latin baptismal registers - this PROFESSIONAL researcher had translated 'de poch'ia', which means, of this Parish, as being 'out of the pocket of the rates, i.e. a pauper!!!). I asked if his researcher had looked at the Shuttleworth Papers - what are they, he said. They cover some 700 years of the Holden family's doings. But because his research was done by a PROFESSIONAL, then mine is wrong, of course. OC

I found my 2xgreat grandmother on Ancestry World Tree. Found she had married twice, on the same date. Busy lady. Actually someone has her marrying using her husbnd's first name and then his second name as two marriages.

I dont want to offend any of our overseas cousins, but all those who contact me seem to be of the same mould as glens contacts. THEY are right YOU must be wrong, even though you are sitting here with the certs in your hand and can walk up the road to see the gravestones. I had one the other day say to me that I must be wrong as the College of Arms had given her the info - the College of Arms?? We are talking ag labs here.

I suppose a lot depends how much you want to reveal and how accurate your tree is. A world tree contains a lot of my direct line,but if i were to believe the entries then g g/m married four times and had a child 7 years after she died,it can lead to contacts like hot matches do,but most of the 'common' names to my tree are American researchers running sites with 2000+ 'families' in their tree. Most contact i have had has been requests for copies of certs to prove i'm wrong and they are right,names match,dates don't. Most of the info appears to come straight from the census,and i keep being told that it must be right and my certs are wrong.God help me if i have thirty wrong certs that match names,years etc but because aunt fanny was born in March and they say July i must have the wrong ones!! Thing is they can never disprove my 'errors' with any factual evidence. Glen

A few people have downloaded to Ancestry. Ancestry World Tree The Ancestry World Tree contains nearly 400 million names in family trees submitted by our users. The Ancestry World Tree is the largest collection of its kind on the Internet.

I have just added my 100th relative onto FTM and a box popped up asking if I wanted to share my tree on the world collection. Do I want to do this? Do other people have their tree's on there?