Friday, February 18, 2022

Does it Sound too Good to be True?

 How Online Trees can Lead Us Astray


I have an ancestor believed to have been born around 1666 in England who supposedly was born on shipboard coming to America.  What we can document is a marriage of a person with her named on 14 Feb 1718 at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.  She is marrying a person believed to be my ancestor.  Male DNA shows my line connected to her husband, but we are still missing a generation, so it is still possible that my ancestor could have been a brother to her husband.  


However, over the years, people have stretched her ancestry backwards and forward with lots of undocumented information.  For example, I have seen trees with her parents listed.  Some trees show her mother as a Day; others show her as a Gray.  When I checked the documentation for the Gray name, it was based on a marriage that occurred about 100 years after my ancestor was born.  


I thought I might have a clue when I saw a photo of a gravestone on one tree.  When I enlarged the photo I saw what it said, posted below.  Then when I went to Find-a-Grave, this was a different Day family, buried in Connecticut, with that person born in Massachusetts and marrying a different person.


Ancestry makes it very easy to absorb photos and records into your trees.  This can be positive or negative - but always check the information and it there are any red flags, save the information for further research or simply ignore. 

If the information sounds too good to be true, it probably is.



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