Grandad's secret life . . .

[clairec666]

I can forgive a lot of errors on Ancestry trees, because once you've clicked on the "leaf litter", it's blimmin' difficult to remove all the wrong information (unless I'm missing something really obvious?)... I just wish Ancestry would stop regarding public trees with the same importance as other record sets in search results. Then maybe we'd get less annoyed with people who "publish" false information (they probably had no intention of presenting their tree as serious research, but regard it as a work in progress, and want to make it public so they can be contacted by relatives). Anyway, that's just my opinion.

[groom]

Surely though the public trees come up as hints rather than records, so you don't add them until you've checked them out?

[barryd]

The worst offenders are those with relatives in places that are situated in two or more countries.

You know .... Durham, Cathedral, Miners Gala, University, Rowing, Labour Party, whats left of them

Suddenly the tree jumps to Durham, North Carolina. Tobacco, Baseball. Democrats, whats left of them.   

[Andrew Tarr]

.... Even though the owner of the tree agreed they'd made a mistake, they haven't changed it, so that's now up to them if they are happy to have incorrect information.

Quite a few of those trees haven't been touched for a long time, if you check when the owner last signed in.  They've probably got bored, or fed up with being told it's all nonsense ... 

[a chesters]

I've just been checking one of the side branches. Born in Sussex, died in New York, was in the 1880 USA census, and also the 1881 UK census . No travel documents either way, only the one in 1847 when he went to USA.

[clairec666]

Surely though the public trees come up as hints rather than records, so you don't add them until you've checked them out?

I think when you search "all records" on Ancestry, the public trees show up along with all the other "proper" search results, i.e. transcribed records, censuses, parish registers, etc. This is why I always search each record set individually... so I only get the results I actually want.

[coombs]

I often type in a surname and county or even parish and then click "Search all records". I also do an exact match or the searches would be swamped and swamped with irrelevant results of people with a name that is vaguely similar, unless I am missing something and I am getting name variants which can come across as useful.

I admit I do see other trees on Anc as inspiration but always check myself. But I do find it very suspect when a John Smith who wed in Suffolk in 1750 was said to be born in London in 1725 and there is no sources attached. Or someone who had children in Sussex and Durham at the same time.

[djct59]

One distant branch of my tree leads me to a man named Hugh Ross (1731-99), a tenant farmer who lived and died in Sutherland and who is buried neath a rather mundane stone In Balnakeil churchyard, Durness, Sutherland.

In the USA there lived a Scotsman named Daniel Ross, born c. 1760, a fur trader whose son John, it is reported, became a chief of the Cherokee nation. Daniel is supposed to be the son of a Hugh, Earl of Ross from Sutherland. He arrived in America as a child and his mother died en voyage.

Perhaps it might be worth noting that (1) there was no holder of the title Earl of Ross in the peerage of the 18th century, and (2) the Hugh in Durness is interred with his widow, who died there age 93 in 1831. Buried nearby is their daughter Marion (1759-88), who was clearly still in northwest Sutherland when her life ended.

Do any of these facts make enthusiastic American researchers stop and wonder? Of course not.