wrong information in family trees and theft of privacy

[barryd]

Wrong information is sometimes just carelessness. I often find errors on one particular site referring to say a County Durham person who I know was born there, married there and died there but the site has them dying in Durham, North Carolina. Or someone who spent their life  in Carlisle, in the County West of County Durham and ends up dying in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. 

I an working on becoming perfect. Until I get there I live and let live. I will Spell Check and press the Post button.

[Erato]

"And anyone can research any deceased person whether related to them or not."

In fact, I think this is inevitable and necessary.  When you're searching for someone, other names turn up  - people who are related by marriage or adoption or maybe by an informal or illicit relationship.  There are also peripheral characters who are part of the story - step parents, previous partners and their children, friends, neighbors, enemies, landladies, business associates and so on.  These people are worth looking at because they may shed some light on your own ancestor's life; they might provide the clues you need.  And sometimes these people are interesting in their own right and prompt a somewhat more intensive look.

[guest189040]

There are a lot of assumptions made in researching families, and that leads to errors.

Some errors on trees are bordering on criminal in that they are so full of holes its plain silly to believe them.

If I look at my own tree which is known in detail within the family going back to pre 1800 then if I look at trees and in particular those of USA based researchers my ancesters got around far more than we know of. 

They also died in a completely different Continent.

No forget others trees, only you can research a person at a time and gather the supporting evidence along the way.

BUT, if you place information in the public domain then it should be expected that someone is going to "borrow" said information.

[isobelw]

I have been doing family history since the 70's and try to back up everything with official documents and check and recheck data. As a result of one of these rechecks I realised that I had completely the wrong person as the g/g/grandfather of my husband. This happened initially because of erroneous information on the death cert. of his g/grandfather. As more Irish records have come online I have been able to amend my tree details on Ancestry but all the people who copied from me ( who are also related in various degrees to my husband) are still showing the erroneous info. That is their look-out as far as I'm concerned. I know that my tree is correct and that is all that matters to me.
Isobel

[Fliss2]

I agree, it is easy to link to people incorrectly too easily.
I think one way of notufying people is to enter extra info into their names lines ie
Griffelda "message of uniqueness" then surname
Should be picked up by the other parties at some stage.
Or add in something in extra facts notes ie a contact email , I know this is unusual but it might solve to problem.
They might be genuinely nice apologetic people and be all too happy to correct this.
Best wishes