substantiating an ancestor

[coombs]

I agree with Kia. They may be very busy with more important things, or they go on the site but dont check their PMs. And, sad to say there may be the sad occasion where the tree submitter has passed away.

[LizzieW]

I agree with the comments, but if someone has only just put records on Ancestry, they must be alive and using Ancestry. 

In fact, the only reason I knew that my grandparents etc. were on someone else's tree was that a message flashed up when I logged on to Ancestry under "Recent Member Connect Activity" and showed  this person  saved the 1881 census with my g.gran's name on it and the 1901 census with one of her sons on it (my g.uncle) on 15 September and the 1901 census with my g.gran's son in law (my grandfather) name on it on 2 October.  This person on Ancestry appears to have used his full name as his member name, and as I said I have never heard of him (it could be a her as the name is used for both male and female).  The g.uncle never married or had children and died in a mental hospital, so he cannot be a descendant from him. 

Lizzie

[Emine]

I thankfully learnt early to question what other people publish when I found a family tree containing the name of my 3x great grandmother. They seemed to have family members all the way back to 1500, which I found impressive but by no means extraordinary enough to make me immediately wary. However, once I had a closer look the flaws seemed obvious:

1) People seemed to zip from one end of the county to the other, which given it's Lincolnshire, that's a fair distance. Not a terrible problem, but it needs to be backed up and this wasn't.
2) Despite all their searching over hundreds of years and the entire county, they failed to find that my 3x great grandmother had married. Sure, it didn't all happen in the same village, but both her husband's birth and their marriage occurred within 4 miles of where she was born. It made me think that they weren't really that thorough in their search,
3) Though the details they gave of my 3x great grandmother's family appear correct, her grandfather seems to have been somewhat extraordinary in his virility. Not only did he manage to father a child at the age of 67, but did so despite having been dead almost 10 years.

Needless to say, when I first used the IGI I realized how and what this person must have done: in their desire to push backwards they just connected any two people together if they had roughly the same name and date of birth, regardless of how credible the result looked. Thus, I find it best to remain wary of those whose interest seems to be finding family ever further back. While I'm happy to look for more distant ancestors I know it's probably "healthier" to concentrate on deepening knowledge about my family's recent past (say 1800 to 1950) than providing a superficial list of names. I have a Boynton in my family, and it would only take one Google search and a lot of gullibility to get back to 1066: I only have to make a "commonsense" judgement and I'm there.

[msallen]

Its perfectly possible to trace a line back to 1100, however as everyone rightly points out, online trees are not sources. You should treat them just as possible clues at best, and work back one generation at a time. There's no point looking at a 15g grandfather if the 10g grandfather is incorrect.

As for the parents of William who married in 1763, parish registers may well be enough to show this depending on whether he was born in the same parish he married in (or in the parish he was said to be of when he married), and further depending on the number of other people of the same surname in the parish. Very often I find I have to recreate the tree for everyone of a single surname within a parish in order to make sense of all the entries.

If you can't reliably place him via parish registers, then looking for wills is the next route I'd suggest. Obviously wills from people of the same surname in the same parish are the place to start, but you will also find the occasional nugget of priceless information in a will that at first glance doesn't look likely to be of any interest.

After you've exhausted wills, then the likelihood of getting back into the medieval period is greatly increased the wealthier the family was. Property records are the most common pre-parish register source. You may find details of less wealthy people in manor court rolls, but the survival of these varies greatly, and even if they still exist they're not an easy source to study as you will nearly always have to consult the originals, which are likely to be written in medieval Latin.

[flaggysmob]

Hello all
Yes the lady is still alive Her side of the family emigrated to Australia and we are only talking 3 generations back so we are quite closely related
On the upside we were able to trace another Flagg from the same line and he was so overjoyed as he thought he was the last of his Flagg line.
I have the same problem LizzieW my Flagg Family are all down in a small villiage in Somerset but this tree claim they come from Norfolk via Dorset. Now I know they have to come from some where but until I can find a source to prove it myself I cant see why they would want to move to the middle of Somerset in the mid 1700 very little industry and the later generations all moved to London and became licensed victuals which makes sense moving to where the work is
That you all for your advice I will start hunting down wills 
Ian

[Plummiegirl]

You will also find people on Ancestry with more than 1 tree - in some cases these are "Professional Genealogists" hoping to find ancestors for their clients, in order to expand their clients tree.

[LizzieW]

msallen - Just had a look at your Genealogy Website (under construction), I really like the way you have set it out and would like to do something similar with my tree for my family, however, I haven't a clue how to do it, or link to other people etc. so I guess I'll just use Word and type out my family history.

Lizzie

[msallen]

Thanks Lizzy 

Believe me I've no great skill in designing web sites - I only use the most basic of HTML syntax. In fact if you're using Word, you can undoubtedly get that to generate much better looking web pages for you without needing any knowledge of what its doing under the covers!

[LizzieW]

I'll have to play around.  I actually use Legacy for my tree from which I can print various "books".  I liked the way you used numbers which linked to someone else.

Lizzie