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General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: andrewalston on Saturday 25 August 18 13:30 BST (UK)
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Can anybody beat this for being wildly out?
In the tree I'm currently dealing with, there's
Martha Towers, born c1813, Preston, Lancashire, England
Hints for her, admittedly under "Other Ancestry Trees", is
Margaret, born 1570, Bacup, Lancashire, England
Incidentally, NONE of the 10 tree hints was for a Martha; all were for Margarets!
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I have noticed a 'slackening off' with Ancestry's OWN dates being way out.. searching today for Gunns in around 16 -1700's it keeps throwing 1800's at me.. crazy
But yes that lucky lady lived a heck of a long time --- Oh Maggie May .. maybe :) margaret Martha.. sorry shes off again. xin in need of r and r.
:)
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DNA hints aren't much better. I've got a couple where the woman they think was our shared ancestor must have been a bigamist if she managed to marry both her husbands and another one where the name of the supposed ancestor isn't even the same on each of our trees so I don't know how they came up with it! I wish these hints came with a button to press labelled "this is baloney".
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Yep -- me and the DNA pages are definitely NOT SYNCing..... fgs.
xin
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Seems the most irrelevant results are suggested in these hints. I ignore them anyway. I think many Anc trees which are compiled by sloppy researchers are hints that they just take as gospel and add them to their tree.
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As I'm going to do my Ancestry DNA this week (I've had the kit for a few weeks now), I decided to put my tree on Ancestry, but keep it private. I keep getting these so called hints. It's amazing how some are half right, they will have my ancestor being born in the correct place etc. but then dying in a place with the right name, but wrong country, usually USA. It seems many of these trees are just copied, but as the person doing the copying doesn't actually know anything about the "ancestor" they are quite happy to accept the default American place.
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Actually, as I have said on here before, quite often it is not sloppiness but being too detailed that causes ancestors to be relocated to America on Ancestry. I guess the algorithm for place works from left to right and being US based its default is there. If, therefore, you put the name of a street before the name of a town in place, if there is a place in US with a name the same as the street name you have put, it will ignore the country and default to that place in the US.
Try it, by putting only a county and England that fact then locates in England and not to a place in US.
I agree that one should check once entered but, particularly when looking at the location tab of DNA, several of my English ancestors were shown as located in US simply because I had included a street name for the event. Without that detail they whizzed right back across the Atlantic to England.
Pheno
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I have a baby girl who died at about 6 months in the 1880s, I have her birth and death registered on her page and last week I had a census for her 20 years before her birth, her aunt, a marriage WW1 era of someone similar name resulting in a 1939 register reference for that person with a DOB about 10 years out and a new death date.
I have had some trouble searching for people - e.g. a man with an unusual name and finding his DOB and MMN on GR knew the year of birth. Restricting to that year and exact name - no such data. 1 year adrift and not exact name there was several pages of births, on the third page I found him - full name as I had it with the year I asked for :o
Ancestry seem to have altered something and it's not for the better. I have over a 1000 hints at the moment over half of those that I have dealt with over the last few days have been rubbish, many being electoral rolls for babies.
I will keep on sorting it out because there are some gems there but what a waste of time some are.
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Switch em OFF -- bin the hints.. use the old fashioned research.. and when you have.. then see what the 16 trees have copied from each other..
I just found one lady Christened in 1730 -- something .. thing is she died in 1630 something.
Maria Pycroft.. bless her.. must have come back for a dip in the font.
i hate the hints.. they get you all excited .. and they are very very rarely anything other than - people latching on to a tree that bears a similar name to the research they are doing.
I am far from perfect.. I have and do KEEP checking, I havent had a lazy day and just copied.. someone who is my 17th great aunt 12 times removed...
No seriously, it is easy to attach a hint that seems feasible and then dispair, when you realise SO badly WRONG..
I am attempting to complete one branch and the amount of name changes.. (spelling) and county movement is crazy.. and that is with me -- Knowing the area well.. then along comes a tree collector from deep in the Mid west of some unknown country -- havent got a clue where Hinckley should be .. so when Ancestry says it is in Main or something... thatll do.
ooops she is off again..
well its raining and the internet is busy busy busy and note on telly.. OH gone off to work ... so miserable .. and struggling.. :) with fh. what a pleasure this hobby is.
:) :) :)
guess who
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I have made some mistakes in the past with my family tree and had to have branches lopped off but a new one has grown out of some of them. We are all human and are bound to make the odd mistake with genealogy from time to time. It is a namesake cousin or someone with the same name who you thought was right, but you then found a will or other record that disputed it.
That is why now I keep them out if I do not have enough evidence to claim them. More and more records are coming online now, and it is handy if you live hundreds of miles from where your ancestors came from.
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As I'm going to do my Ancestry DNA this week (I've had the kit for a few weeks now), I decided to put my tree on Ancestry, but keep it private. I keep getting these so called hints. It's amazing how some are half right, they will have my ancestor being born in the correct place etc. but then dying in a place with the right name, but wrong country, usually USA. It seems many of these trees are just copied, but as the person doing the copying doesn't actually know anything about the "ancestor" they are quite happy to accept the default American place.
Can I suuest that you save your money and pass on the test.
My Wife and I dd ours a couple of years ago.
The results were totally non conclusive and bore no relationship to our research.
To make matters worst we have recently had an update from Ancestry and the results of both of us have totally changed and they now bear zero correlation to the original results. They still bear no resemblence to our trees.
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Just had one for a gentleman born in 1706, who Ancestry think may have been baptised in 1806 - I have heard of adult baptism but ………………………………….!
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Can I suggest that you save your money and pass on the test.
Too late already bought the kit. I know my son is linked via Ancestry DNAvwith a couple of women, probably mother and daughter but we can't find out how. Interestingly they are both linked with me on 23andMe, which my son bought me for Christmas. At least that means the link isn't on my husband's side.
In the hints I received recently, I found one who had my (deceased) brother on his tree. So I wrote to ask what connection he had to my brother (and therefore me). He told me he is linked via my g.grandfather - the origins of whom I can't trace. Every tree on Ancestry that names him gives his parents as 2 people that I'm convinced are not his parents, so as this man has DNA results on Ancestry I'll be glad to find out if I'm linked to him somehow. If I am then all the other trees are right and I've solved the mystery, but then if I'm not connected to this man, then all the trees are wrong. Most of them have very dubious connections to me and just seemed to have plucked the so-called parents out of thin air without any reason for them.
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I know my son is linked via Ancestry DNA with a couple of women
:o
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;D ;D ;D
me too
Just found a fella born in the late 1400s served in the war 1914 they put his papers up to prove it.. fgs...
Thomas Grooucoke Leicestershire
He is in an open tree... the spellings of that name have made my brain coddled..
xin
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I know my son is linked via Ancestry DNA with a couple of women
:o
Ha, ha, not quite what I meant. One of the women is apparently his 3rd or 4th cousin, the other his 4th or 5th cousin. On 23andMe the same women are my 2nd and 3rd cousins. Weird that we can't find the connection though.
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In two years I have had two DNA hints that worked out.
At £30 per hint the DNA test has yet to prove really useful for my Wife and I.
Btw, she has one DNA hint but so far we cannot find the actual link.
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At £30 per hint the DNA test has yet to prove really useful for my Wife and I.
On the other hand, I've bought lots of Birth certs that I found were not my family now, of course, that GRO has mother's maiden name, it's easier to find the right cert.
It will be money well spent, as far as I'm concerned, if I can find out once and for all whether my g.grandfather is the man all the trees on Ancestry think he is. If he's not, I still have to find him but I think that will be a solid brick wall.
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I shall be very interested to hear of any success or otherwise that you have with the DNA results.
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I'll let you know when I get the results, I guess about 6-8 weeks from when I post my DNA which will be tomorrow.
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With the DNA, I think you get out of it what you put into it. If you only look at your nationality estimate, then you will find the experience wholly unsatisfying. If you look at how many people haven't connected their trees then you might not see the point. If you do all the work yourself, rummaging through the profiles and contacting people, you might get something out of it. Ancestry doesn't make it easy for you to make use of the DNA section, you have to get deeply involved.
I am the researcher behind my mother's DNA results on Ancestry. I process them and see if I can work out how they are related. I have currently identified the link of 47 profiles- the more I can identify, the more I can work out using "Shared Matches". For a lot of those profiles they are connected to me around a few central hubs, such as my UGLOW line, TREWARTHA line or my WOOD line- this just about confirms the paperwork of those lines as correct, which is good to know because of the potential for incorrect research, non-paternal events etc. Others have helped in other ways- for example, my 2xgt grandmother was illegitimate and we had a theory about who the father was. After receiving multiple different DNA matches from the supposed father's family we can only conclude that the father himself was one of four, perhaps five, different men from that family. We might never know which one, but his ancestry is right there to see.
While I wasn't the one who spent the money on it, I certainly intend of making use of every penny of it.
Ayashi
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'Uglow'
the name of an Artist I admired very much.. gone too soon.
Euan Uglow.
I loved his work..
xin
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I'm glad I found this thread as it's the perfect place to share the hint I received this morning.
It's a photo of the gravestone for my GG Grandfather and GG Grandmother ... taken by ME! Clearly a few people copied the photo from my tree to their trees, and now Ancestry has regurgitated it as a hint back to me. More than a bit ironic, but if nothing else it gives me a lead of someone else's tree to have a nose around.
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It does make you laugh tho .. I edited a photograph, the way ONLY I could edit it of my GG x3 gran and it is all over Ancestry -- I just giggle.. bless em.. let em enjoy - it does bear a resemblance to her and so - gives them that, if not an actual copy.
xin
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Obviously I was proud of myself for having found the gravestone and initially a bit miffed when others first copied it to their trees. However, it's taken in a public place so ultimately anyone could go and take the same picture. Since then I've chosen to make most photos on my tree - especially old photos of actual people - private. Sure, people can ask to see them (they come up in search results) but I can then control where they go.
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It's the indiscriminate copying of trees that annoys me...just because one member of the family happened to have the same name. Because part of my family has Kemble as a family name (not surname) one person has assumed the earliest possible direct line is a member of the (acting) Siddons family, even though I have finally proved through official documentation/records that it is the husband of that person who bears the name. Consequently, about 20 other people are claiming to be members of the Siddons family by copying in this one fact - I guess they are all looking for their little bit of fame. The person they are attaching to the Siddons tree has a totally different surname and is born several hundred miles from where the Siddons were living at the time. I've even provided links to the Siddons family tree, which is quite exhaustively researched and fully detailed. I've thought about getting the DNA of Himself, but a couple of people have put me off and it would not give me the result I am looking for (I am convinced he is Viking!). Still, we carry on, eh? It's too fascinating not to!
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The worst Ancestry 'hint' I received wasn't actually incorrect at all, just inconvenient.
Somebody who I assume is a user of Family Tree Maker had somehow managed to upload the images of the birth, marriages and death index of an individual to their profile over a hundred times each. Each individual one comes up as a hint for that person, and you have to reject them one by one.
I like to get rid of the shaky leafs as much as possible, so that was a few minutes of unnecessary clicking.
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Re reply 15
To find your mutual great grandparents for 2nd and 3rd cousins it's actually helpfull to go back and extra generation
Can you identify all 8 of your g GPS rents and compare to theirs
If none in common could be match not string enough .
If there were remarriage or love children born to one grandparent a 2nd cousins link will come up as 3rd cousin
Does that make sense ...mum and I found her half cousin ...only one grandparent in common so heasy was matched to her around second cousin and to me as a 3rd
Other 3rd cousing matches have been grand children of great aunt ..so you need to list all siblings in each generation too...it helps find matches .
Good luck.
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Just had another insane suggestion!
For Ann Thornton, born 1834 in Lancashire and died in June 1836 (both baptism and burial at Blackrod attached to the tree), Ancestry suggests I check out:
An 1891 census entry for a Jane Young in Portsea, Hampshire.
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Just had another insane suggestion!
For Ann Thornton, born 1834 in Lancashire and died in June 1836 (both baptism and burial at Blackrod attached to the tree), Ancestry suggests I check out:
An 1891 census entry for a Jane Young in Portsea, Hampshire.
There are several "Jane Young"s in Portsea in 1891. One looks like the Jane Ann Thornton bc1833 who m. Harry W Young in 1854. Both b. Hampshire so no link other than that.
Sometimes I wonder whether these algorithms do not treat a burial event as conclusive proof of a death. As you imply, there should be no suggestion give in the case of anyone for a date after they have died.
At least Portsea and Bolton are in the same country!
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Ancestry just threw a wobbler and totally locked me out.
Had to phone support to get it unlocked, spoke to a really annoying American.
Anyway its all OK now.
Whilst on to them I gave them a blast about the terrible hints and suggested that they get their Tech to look at forums such as this to see how bad their site now is.
Also mentioned that the document images we used to see in the hints is no longer available in the same numbers
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Hints can be useful sometimes, I've just found my gt-grandma is in Shropshire, she's 141 years old and has reverted to her maiden name ???
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Sometimes I wonder whether these algorithms do not treat a burial event as conclusive proof of a death.
I believe that is the case. If you have baptism and burial facts for a person but no birth or death facts, it doesn't take those dates into account.
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If you have baptism and burial facts for a person but no birth or death facts, it doesn't take those dates into account.
It doesn't take birth or death into account either. The Ann Thornton I mentioned has Birth and Death entries, because the events were not actually in Blackrod, but close by. Burial ought to imply death, and until recently that would have been in the couple of days before the burial.
I don't know for sure what the usual arrangements are in Ancestry's Utah. Some Mormons have multiple wives; perhaps they go in for multiple burials too. ;D
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I was just about to ring up my Cousin to give him an earfull about not inviting us to his wedding which had just come up as an Ancestry hint when I noticed he got married 120 years before he was born.