Genealogy Chat

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Got a mail this morning asking about my GGrandad. I nearly replied 'not connected' as the wife was wrong. Then I noticed she had opened her tree for me and on checking found loads of my ancestors that we ARE second cousins. Had her tree not been viewable I would have rejected her and we both would have missed out on valuable information. Perhaps there is a lesson there. Bob

I don't understand - if the wife is wrong, then how do you know the rest is right? Or am I missing the point? OC

OC I I think she has made an assumption about a marriage. She has my grandmother, Ggranddad, GGGranddad etc all right place and date of births etc. The whole tree is correct apart from two errors one of which was her 'contact' info. I am now waiting for a reply to sort the errors. Bob

I'd be most reluctant to open my (2000+ people) tree to all and sundry. Some people who contact me say 'have a look at my tree' and 99 times out of 100 there's no connection. OTOH, I've just had a message that says 'my great-grandmother was Annie Bloggs who married Jim Smith'. That was enough information to establish a match. The actual surnames are more unusual, and I gave details of one generation further back where my family and theirs join up. J

But what's the the point of being secretive about historical facts? ie our family history? It is not your tree, it is history. Opening your tree to 'all and sundry' is what this site is all about. Bob

Robert Because, unless you are contacted by your long lost twin, then no-one shares more than half your tree, at most. When I am contacted by someone who shares a relative with me in 1700, I give them information on THEIR line, which is not necessarily the same as mine. If they want more than that, well, they can do what I did - research it themselves. I don't have any magic powers, everything I found out is available to the public in some form or other. I do have to say that I have yet to receive ONE useful fact from anyone else regarding my tree - I am ALWAYS the giver of information and sometimes don't even get a thankyou. OC

Well you are really unfortunate OC. I have obtained much info and found three or four cousins on this site who have provided me with invaluable information and photos of ancestors I have never seen. You obviously fail to understand the the basic purpose of this site. Bob

Robert Oh, I DO understand the purpose of this Site. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked in my favour. OC

Robert, People should never 'assume' anytrhing. They might get hunches or info from another's tree but then they must try every which way to prove them by censuses, church records , record offices etc, word of mouth etc. To copy someone's tree that they have spent years of research on .... and to then copy it incorrectly,... and then make it public is not in the best interests of anyone. I am entirely with you OC. on this one. And MY people are MY people. They are not public property until uncovered. M

When I first joined Genes, I enthusiastically opened my tree to the first person who asked me. Our supposed link was someone born in 1722, a sibling of my ancestor. They in turn opened their tree to me. With sinking heart, I realised they had absolutely no proof of a marriage for their ancestor, and their whole tree was based on this marriage. It was too late - they copied my tree and to this day it is still on here. Fortunately, I had already disguised living people, but it is EXTREMELY irritating to me, that this person regularly crops up in my Hot Matches, parading MY ancestors as theirs. By keeping my tree private I am prepared to run the risk of missing out on a ninth cousin three times removed - I use the name search facility on this Site and do my contacting that way. OC

i have spent years puting my tree together, using my 4 weeks holidays to visit records offices around the country and go to various local studies library every saturday, i have purchased several thousand pounds worth of certs, iam into my 2 year Ancestry World Delux at £200 would i let anybody see my work, yes of coarse i would, i think this is what its all about fully agree with bob, i open my tree to anyone that contacts me, although i have only a very basic tree on here, but would send gedcom of full tree to anyboady, dont see what all this secrecey is about all the info you have is out there.

Gary My tree has cost me thousands of ££ too, and nearly 40 years of hoofing around all over the place. I am extremely happy to share my tree with a PROVEN contact - but I am not at all happy to share with someone who hasn't even established who their grandparents are. I will do whatever I can to HELP anyone - but that does not include giving them a tree which is possibly nothing to do with theirs. There is enough utter rubbish clogging up the Internet without adding YET ANOTHER incorrect tree to it. OC

M.G.H.S. Funny you should reply to this thread...you appear in my Hot Matches, according to which, we share (I think) 20 relatives. Now, I could have contacted you when the first match appeared and opened my tree to you. However, examination of the 20 mutual rellies reveals that they are random matches all over the tree and lots not even in the same county. I have to say - and I mean this respectfully - that I am very glad I did not open my tree to you,(not that you asked BTW) because you SEEM to be saying that (had you thought there was a genuine, or even a possible connection) you would have added my tree to yours and then happily passed it on to anyone who asked. Is that what you are saying? Please correct me if I have this wrong. OC

There is far too much emphasis on 'trees' on this site, your own or anyone else's. If you are all doing your research properly, there is absolutely no need to open your tree or have anyone else open their tree for you. As OC has said if you want to make any contact, then use the search facility which is what I do all the time. There is only one person on this site researching the same family that I am, and he has nowhere near the information I have on the family. If he was clever enough, he could soon work out which names of interest I had. You can make up your own trees from other people's research by using the Search facility. I will leave you all to use your own commonsense as to how this might be done, but believe me it is very simple! Because of these very basic flaws in the Genes site I have very few ancestors on here. I must say that if a person had got the wrong wife, I would be very dubious about the rest of the tree. One person I contacted in the beginning had claimed all my tree going back to the 1700's, all because he had failed to check a wife. Oh yes, an easy mistake I might hear you say, but it should NEVER happen if you are a thorough researcher, two women called Elizabeth coming from the same place, born at the same time, but a little intelligence and use of census plus buying a cert would quickly ensure that this could not happen. I accepted his version in good faith but then decided a couple of years later to check his info by buying a cert that he should have bought in the first place as the line was very much sideways for me, but supposed to be mainline for him. The Cert proved he had climbed the wrong tree, and he had been on my tree for 2 years. He did, however, have the grace to move off when I pointed out his error. If people would only buy certs, use census and use commonsense to prove their lineage we would not have this sort of thread appearing every so often. I am never interested in someone else's tree. I am only ever interested in a quick query answer to see if a particular person is connected in some way and then I will decide whether or not to take it further. Janet

Janet 'I must say that if a person had got the wrong wife, I would be very dubious about the rest of the tree.' The wife concerned was born in 1840. This is where you and and OC and the rest of the secret society totally miss the point. This is a cousin !! I have checked out the details on her tree. Why are you obsessed with secrecy? Your ancestors DON'T belong to you. You would have lost the connection that I now have. All my tree is viewable on tribalpages and it's never done me any harm. Bob

Shortly after I joined Genes, I had an email from another member, enquiring about my Great great uncle, who was their great grandfather. I replied that there was no connection, because this man died, unmarried in 1900. Back came an email - thankyou, can you just confirm that his parents were NOT X and Y? I fell off my chair because his parents WERE X and Y. A frantic exchange of emails and a phone call established that in fact, he had married three months before he died and left a pregnant wife. We now pool our information and efforts. But neither of us has ever seen the need to open our trees to each other - why would he be interested in my mother's tree, for instance, or that of MY great grandmother - who is not his great grandmother, and why would I be interested in his wife's tree? No, you are quite right, my ancestors don't belong to me, they belong to all their descendants. But as a form of respect for my ancestors, they deserve NOT to be tacked onto some spurious tree made up entirely of IGI entries. We shall have to agree to disagree on our policies. OC

OC You have got to the point in a very precise way. Robert I am sharing parts of my 'trees' very happily with cousins that I have met on the internet doing their research properly and I have contacts in Hong Kong, America, Canada, Australia, Ireland and Bermuda, as well as UK, but and this is the cruical point, we share the parts of the tree interesting to them and me NOT the whole tree. My American cousins sharing Irish connections on my father's side are not a bit interested in my Scottish mother's side of the family, so what is the point of even showing them that side of the tree. I am not missing anybody on here because there is nobody with as much information as I have. My American cousins would disagree with your statement, about me being secretive about my Irish family history.On the contrary, I have shared ALL the relevant Irish side with them, unknown to them until they met me, right back to 1798 and WE are still working on it together. They give me clues and I act on the clues, as it is easier for me to do this. On this side, unusually, we are related on both sides of the family, going back from great grandparents, but even so they will not be interested in my grandfather's wife,whose family history is taking a totally different track. None of us are into collecting anybody and everybody, so name collectors are not on the menus for us. The one great contact I have which has given me more information than I had is one I sought myself through a site in Perthshire and that has produced wonderful results. Too many sit around the Genes site 'waiting' for information to be drip fed to them, via the IGI and other dubious means of obtaining their 'family history.' To date I have not lost a single contact through not showing my complete tree. In fact I always find that people are very grateful for the information I provide. Janet

My personal view (and it is only my own personal view) is that I don't feel there is anything to be secretive about either, and am happy to open my tree and leave it open to anyone who shares a positive match. On the other hand, if someone is so distant and only barely related via marriage, then I won't open my tree, as I feel there is no point. I will give them info like the parents, siblings & children, if I have them, but be honest and say that is all the info I have as it is not really a direct ancestor. Initially if I found a contact, however distant, I would add them, but have recently gone through and done some 'pruning' in order to take off people that keep coming up in hot matches that I really don't have much of an interest in. Direct descendants, my grandfather's brothers children and their descendants - yes I include, and will also add their spouse and occasionally their parents, but when I get a match saying that the person is the brother of the mother of the spouse of my Grandfather's brother's son's wife, then I simply say that the relationship is very distant and that I only have them on there because X married Y etc. I have no worries about anyone who is a close connection copying my tree. I was very kindly given lots of help by others in the same way. I try my best to keep in contact with them and let them know of anything new I have added to my tree. Yes it is my hard work (and possibly harder than for many others, as being disabled I don't have the ability to chase round many church yards or records offices with as much ease as able bodied people), but I still don't mind sharing it, as to share is to grow in the knowledge of others. I don't consider my ancestors to be mine alone. My Grandmother is also grandmother to others, in the same way as my Great Grandparents were Great Grandparents to others. I've never felt that I have needed to be defensive and say that they were 'all mine'. I love sharing the info I have and hearing how happy people are when they learn from it. It makes it all the more worthwhile when I can say 'I found that out' rather than 'I copied it from someone else', but if I have been fortunate enough to have been given the information by someone else, then I make sure I let the new contact know that it came through a third party. Surely the idea of this site is to share the names in our tree, so that others can see if they have a match. I once opened a tree to find only the contacts name on it. When I commented on it, I was told that they kept their tree elsewhere so that others couldn't copy it. So in other words, they wanted to see if anyone else had any info they could add to their tree, but didn't want to share what info they had with others. Not really how this site operates. Each to their own and all that, but I don't think I could do that, as I would feel too selfish. Still, we live and learn and I guess we just have to accept that some people are more willing to gather information from whatever means, but not as willing to share it with others. I'm not saying do all the work just for others to copy. Even when I get information, I always double check it myself wherever possible. Guess it will always be a problem :o(

I have had a recent message from a hot match saying he may be of help if I contact him, which I did. He asked to view my tree and he opened his for me. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to view his before opening mine. When I did look, I found it just had one name in it - his. He later told me that he collects information from other trees related to his surname and publishes it in books (5 so far) and is not willing to let me see more of it unless I buy the books!!! I have complained to GR but they say they can/will not do anything about it. Cheeky B...... I do not know open my tree as a matter of course as I used to, only if I am reasonably sure that there is a match.