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On Ancestry.com, I use the "leaf" to get leads on my brick walls.... and someone who has been solid as a rock just pulled a bonehead mistake.
They sourced my g-g-grandmother being somewhere 30 some years after she's been married for the second time with her maiden name. And apparently married to her BROTHER.
In those days, when Judy Smith married Bill Miller, she became Judy Miller and she stayed that way till she died or remarried. She doesn't go back to being Judy Smith just because you find a Judy Smith near where you want your Judy Miller to be.
ROUND PEG, SQUARE HOLE -- DOESN'T FIT. KEEP LOOKING.
I feel better now.... thank you.
Been there. Check out the people search forum. Over the course of 3 days they managed to clear up 30 years of tears and frustration. If I could reach thru and hug them, I would. I hope you find the right info.
I am doing a line that skipped one set of people completely, and then said the grandfather (which was listed as the father) was younger than the grandchild (listed as the child).
Fixing an error like that is a HUGE pain - especially with traditional Gaelic names.
Good article. One of my first brick walls was my great grandparents. I think great grandma died soon after giving birth to her second child (I still don't know this to be a fact) and Great grandpa gave one child to each grandparent to raise (Fact) and soon after remarried a woman with her own child and didn't take them back (Fact). And then my great grandpa died when my grandmother was 16....
And they were never mentioned again.
I just got lucky finding someone else who was looking into great grandpa's family.... and they knew....
Yeah, it's scary how easy it was for people - especially kids - to just "disappear" back then. Sometimes I wonder if they fell into more dire fates. My g-grandmother died in 1931. What happened to her was a big mystery until I received her death certificate and found the cause: heart embolism and malnutrition, related to childbirth. Once I got past the horror of that, I started wondering about the baby. The child she gave birth to - well, she wasn't recorded in any other family trees and I couldn't find any records for her. I assumed she died at birth until I asked my mother and was told that the baby was given to a relative in another state. Her name was changed and she lost any connection to her birth family. My mother had a vague notion of the part of the state and last name of the relative but other than that - POOF! the kid was gone. Yet another notation for my Mystery Files to investigate once I get some time.
Just yesterday I found someone who is evidently related to my grandmother's brother. But they have this guy being the son of his grandfather and grandmother, and they have given him about sixteen or seventeen children. But are so many duplicate names amongst the children, with no deaths for the earlier name holder, that this alone should have been a clue that something was very wrong.
Of course they had combined two families into one, without stopping to ask themselves if any couple would be so stupid as to duplicate five names among living children!...
And how could they have one child in October and another in November of the same year?
So much crap out there. We gotta consider the source!
But then again I had one couple who had a healthy child - their first - in August though they were married that May - just 3 months prior. My mom said, joking of course, "Oh, a premature birth."
A have a relative who lived until she was 125 and gave birth to her last child at the age of 90, according to the dates on some trees Someone is thinking along Biblical lines, believing that
I use Ancestry now. It's my repository until I can pull all this stuff together on to a personally created site. I don't think a day goes by that I don't see a notification on my home page that 'so-n-so has save x-record/story/obituary/file to their tree'. I'm OK with that, being quite sure about my sources, and think I must have been a historian or school marm in a previous life because I'm glad to provide that kind of information but I'm a little squicked at the notion that these people might be going out and doing that sort of thing whilly-nilly to all trees they come across. And then it becomes exponential because other people are pulling the same to their trees. I don't have the time to check other trees, but the ones I come across with dates and information so bad it's laughable - I sometimes feel like sending a note saying "would you fix that?PLEASE? "
I have a 5th g-grandfather and gr-grandmother of my husband who are cited in 1790 census, deeds, several articles from reputable genealogy societies, later censuses, books about the county they lived in with articloes on his business. I had the county historian there check the graves. One researcher has them buried in MA when they are buried in upstate NY (I have grave photos). 12 contacts with the poster and no change.
Every other person citing them uses the correct info (I send it). They can stay wrong.
If the item in Ancestry does not have scholarly citations, do NOT use it for anything but getting to the real facts
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