Anybody doing genealogy?

I know my family claims it. We claim William the Conqueror as well.

We're not blood related, but a great-uncle of mine was married to Dorothy Parker. I always thought that was cool.

Also, AWESOME post, Starman. I'd love to dig into my family's past like you have.

 

The more digging at ancestry.com I do the more malletheads I find.

How do you turn a family of five into a family of thirteen, with a seventy-eight year gap between the youngest and oldest sibling?

At least the tree-making savant got the parents names right and one of the kids. Huzzah!

After that it was happy time making the keyboard go clicky-clack.

 

I've seen a bunch of instances where I think people have combined grandparents/parents and children, possibly identically-named nieces/nephews, etc etc. The average lifespan in the 18th century was not 80.

Also in past centuries, you had very large families with many children dying young. I've also seen instances where a family had one child die very young, then later have another child and give them the same name, which really scrambles things. (P.S. I am not related to George Foreman, as far as I know.)

One real problem when you're on Ancestry, if you click on "Member Family Trees" and those family trees have minor differences in given names, birth dates, etc etc, for certain people, if you click to "include all" of those family trees, each differently named or aged person is added separately, so you can end up with families of 30+ people. Then you have to go back and figure out which are the duplicates and delete them.

Usually when the Ancestry search comes up with multiple family trees as "possible matches," I just pick the one that has the most matching information with things I already know -- exact birth dates of a parent, exact spelling of names -- that's the best indication the rest of the info is good too.

 

A good strategy.

If you can find even one other member on Ancestry who you think you can trust, that can really help you weed out the idiots who just add every tree they see.

 

The malletheads at ancestry.com have broken me.

I have started a tree.

If anyone runs across the "Mallethead Family Tree' that'd be me and my gene pool.

 

Yeah. My mother died at 63, her father died at 63. A great-grandfather died at 62, HIS father died at 61, HIS father died at 63 (all, apparently, of unrelated causes -- one was hit by a falling tree).

I'm gonna be pretty nervous for the 2-year stretch between 61-63.

 

Question for the class..

How much stuff do you upload to ancestry.com?

I have a sibling telling me I shouldn't upload any pictures of long-gone family members or documents such as ship manifests, naturalization papers, obits, census or marriage records from the old country, etc.

Sibling tells me a public forum is not appropriate or safe, and I might upset relatives I do not have contact with by posting pictures of their grandparents, etc.

To be clear, 99% of the information would start around 1920 and go back from there. There are a couple of pictures from the early 1940's.

Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks.

 

My thoughts on this are to possibly follow the guidelines for when the census records gets published. If the records you are uploading are at least as old as the most recently released, I would think you are OK.

 

The thing I would be careful of would be posting pictures and personal info of relatives currently living, or their parents.

I don't care what relatives I've never met before think of me posting stuff about our common 3rd/4th great-grandparents (or farther back). They have no more proprietary rights over them than I do.

 

People can't see info for any members that are living. Think it shows up as Scorpio Living Member (or something like that).

As far as photos and ship manifests, etc, if it is already public record, probably fine to use it on your tree.

 

You can set privacy levels so as to only show living members to the tree owner, "editors" or "contributors," or to the public overall. I think most of my stuff on living relatives is restricted to "editors," who are all my siblings, first cousins or aunts/uncles and are all wildly supportive.

Probably 95% of the stuff on my tree I dug up through Google, so it's already out in the cyber-world anyway.

 

I like that idea.