After smashing through another one of my brick walls I love it that with ancestry.com you can whizz through a newly discovered branch establishing links using the sources that they make available. One disadvantage is that ancestry makes it seem very easy, but you actually need to be REALLY careful to cross-check every step or you just build a castle of crap and there are so many trees like that on ancestry!
I put up a tree based on my years of painstaking research which broke new ground (though I say so myself!) – and I guess I should be flattered rather than annoyed – but there are dozens of trees that have copied large chunks of it without citing any sources at all! Occasionally I find a tree with an unexpected new family member added in that I couldn’t find out anything about (eg one of my gg grandmothers!), with no source given and I would dearly love to know what information it is based on in case there’s something substantial there. But so often people don’t reply to questions you ask them in ancestry (sigh) And often people don’t even copy accurately, linking people in at the wrong generation etc. Please, if you’re going to copy my family at least get it right!
This leads to another pet hate which gets worse the more information I put in ancestry. Ancestry attach little green leaves to ancestors which are supposed to mean there’s some new information about that person. In fact 90% of those green leaves now just lead to yet another tree which has simply copied the information which I put in ancestry in the first place!
Worst of all, I get green leaves in ancestry for images which I can tell have been copied directly from this website and put into ancestry! I’m pretty sure I said my images could be used with acknowledgement… and thanks to some people who have asked and given acknowledgement – though none of you came via ancestry!
Why do I pay ancestry so much! Maybe I’ll delete my ancestry tree and leave all the copy-cats to chase each other’s tails in ever diminishing circles. On the other hand I did all this research because I wanted our family story to be known.
ALERT FOR ANCESTRY COPY-CATS. There’s a whole new branch of this Beatty family – never before linked on ancestry or anywhere else – for you to copy now 🙂 get to it!
Oh and I’ll give details of that here soon.
End of rant. Thanks for listening…
[Update Tues 10 Sept: Apologies for that! I could have avoided making our family story public and made my ancestry tree private and I chose not to, so it’s all self-inflicted. And I know that many people who follow this blog are serious family historians who would do none of the things that upset me yesterday. And not everyone who is curious about their family has the time or skills to do serious research and it’s OK just to see what you can find in ancestry, and ancestry’s silly algorithms are not your fault! The path I chose has advantages and disadvantages. Moving on.]
taggerty 