Hello everybody. I had no idea that this forum is so massive! I'm very excited to get involved and see if I can clarify some of the sloppy research that I did a number of years ago.
I signed up for Ancestry quite a long time ago and made a little too much use of the publicly-available family trees. It soon became obvious that one of the people who put together their tree wasn't paying attention to dates and just assumed that all of the records they saw belonged to the person that they were searching for. I found myself in a bit of a loop, knowing that there was a terrible mistake in my tree, but I couldn't work my way back and figure out where the problem was.
It has something to do with the fact that many of my ancestors have extremely common names and they were often born in the same year as unrelated people. There's a lot of room for coincidence!
So this time, I am going about it properly (I hope!!). I am going backwards from what I know to be true (ie. my grandparents) and making a lot of notes, taking screenshots, and saving the transcripts/scans of census results. It is taking a very, very long time, but at least I will be able to verify that whoever appears in my tree actually belongs there. So far I have over 400 people, but I estimate that I've verified the identities of 30 or 40 by now.
Anyway, enough from me. I can't wait to get started!