Genealogy Chat

Just starting this thread out of curiosity really, wondering what the record is for the greatest number of relatives in a tree. I have nearly 500 and the most I know of is someone with a very tenuous connection to me (his gggg-aunt married my gggg-uncle, or something like that), with 1300. Does anyone have more than that?

I am so proud of myself i have the grand old total of 13 different surnames, I only joined in October and started searching properly about february this year, Bearing in mind i only knew 2 when i started, My parents who are both dead, i feel like i should have at least 50 more but they were false alarms, i know i will be embarressed later when people put thousands on so thats why i'm doing it now before i chicken out. MOEx

I clicked on someones name (on these boards) accidently earlier today and noticed that they had 12,000!! I had to check twice to make sure I wasn't reading it wrongly and I very nearly sent them a message asking how on earth they have managed to uncover so many relatives! And I was proud of myself for getting just over 500. Sam x

Can we have two lists here, please? First list - all your ancestors who are certificated and/or churched. Second list - your unproven, fantasy file. My first list contains 140 individuals (but Gr has just made it 153, LOL). My second list, that is my Fantasy File, has thousands and thousands in it. It has no credence whatsoever because none of it is checked. I am VERY VERY suspicious of anyone who claims to have 12,000 individuals in their tree - 12,000 times £7 for birth certs alone is £84,000. Who is the author of the tree, Paul Getty??? Olde Crone

Well, according to an article that was in some paper or magazine the other day, Sheila Wray has 100,000 in her tree all checked and verified. I must admit I wondered about it myself, especially as according to the article Sheila says that one should double check everything. I did query it with her, but she claims it is all kosher. Just imagine how many queries one would get from other people on the site trying to match up with one of your relatives. One would need a whole bevy of secretaries to deal with the correspondence!

Well, considering it has taken me over five years to verify my paltry 140, she must have some incredible resources to hand! I just dont understand how she can have done it. Practically every one of my 140 has involved some kind of effort, taking days, weeks, months and YEARS in some cases (my 2 x GGF death cert for instance, took 5 years to track down, it had not reached the GRO AND he had died in a totally unexpected place). I have recently spent a total of 25 hours flogging through ONE Parish Register, only to discover that my ancestors were serious liars. Correspondence with Records Office (too far away to visit) often takes months to get any result. Not to mention the cost of all this research..... Olde Crone

I have 4000 related in my main file (GenesReunited tends to lag behind the main database), there are another 4000 unrelated in the database. Most of them have been imported from other people and are not of much relevance to me but I regularly get queries from people on GenesReunited and I am usually able to put them in touch with someone who can give them more information. I have been researching some friends' family also and I keep being tempted to put a dummy link in so that I can include on GenesReunited in the hope that I might find someone connected to their family. MB

Wow. The number I can verify directly (i.e. have met) is 19: me, my brother, Mum, Dad, Granny and Grandad, two uncles, two aunts, five cousins, Granny's sister and brother-in-law and Grandad's sister and and brother in-law. Add in the ones that I can verify indirectly (i.e. one of the aforementioned knows/remembers them) and that goes up to about 100, of which I've found 40 in the BMD so far (not bad, seeing as all I've had is a few looks on ancestry and one visit to the FRC) and, being impoverished, haven't ordered any of the certificates. There are a few more I've found on censuses who, despite having no certification for, have too many names and places the same for it to be a coincidence; the rest come from other people's research, and as they've invariably been into family history for far longer than me (not hard - I've been doing it for about two months) and consequently know much more about it, I trust them. How long, on average, would you estimate that it takes to find convincing evidence that a relative is genuine? Ten minutes maybe? Multiply that by 100,000 and you find that it takes nearly two years - if you don't bother sleeping or eating in the meantime. Hmm...

I do try not to eat drink sleep and breathe family history..... but it's hard. I have more relatives than are on this site, but I do like quality, rather than quantity. There are five generations of James Broomfield that I always get muddled up on. What use is that, if you know their names, but cannot remember whether they would have worn trousers or knee breeches? The pertinent question is: how many relatives could you talk about for more than five minutes without checking your files. I doubt if I could do that for more than fifty at the most.

My answer to that is the living ones and maybe one or two others that I've heard stories about from parents/grandparents. For the others the absolute maximum is name, date and place of birth, baptism, marriage, death and burial, names of immediate family and occupation - 'absolute maximum' being the key words there, as there are very few people for whom I'm not missing several of those.

I have about 3500 people in my tree. This is made up of both mine and my hubbys families. I haven't confirmend them all with certs, nor do I intend to. I can't afford to for a start! lol For most, there are church records which suffice for me. I have only for as far back as the mid 1700s with most names. For one side (Cook! Could they be related to James Cook? I wonder), I haven't got much past 1900 lol I'm not ashamed to say that I haven't verified every single name in my tree. I've only been doing this since last October. I do plan on checking every name, but that will take a very long time. In response to Brendas question, I think my answer would be about 10 lol

Michael TEN MINUTES to find convincing evidence?!! You wouldn't like to do my tree, would you? The trouble with relying on rellies is they forget/get things wrong/lie. My father totally forgot that he had a great aunt and uncle who had twins, whose descendant contacted me through this site to my utter amazement - I had his great-grandfather dead at 40, a bachelor (BUT - I didnt get the cert!!!!!! Which would have told me that he was MARRIED when he died). He gave his grandfather an extra brother called Josh. Endless research has convinced me that this was in fact Joseph, one of three, not four. Census info told me that my 3 x GGM was the daughter of her father, on several occasions. PR proves she wasnt, she was illegitimate and brought up by her mother's brother. I do realise that I am a nit-picking purist. I just wish it was possible to distinguish at first sight, those who think like I do, and those who adopt a gung-ho approach, i.e. it looks right, so probably is. That's fine, if those people are satisfied with that, but I'm not - I have spent far too much time and money following the wrong families for generations, not to check EVERYTHING now - and by checking, I mean seeing the Primary Source Document with my own eyes. Just because people have been researching for years, and you are but a newbie, doesnt make them right and you wrong! Olde Crone

I've got about 1400 on GR, 2600 on my off line tree. I have been searching for about 20 years and have certificates, parish register records to verify most of my direct ancestors. It also helped that I had a goodly number of great aunts who lived to a great age and a good source of info from family diaries, address books, birthday books etc. There are of course lots of names not (yet) backed up by certificates - these tend to be lines I have traced of descendants of siblings of my direct ancestors. However they are only on the tree if I have found them on census returns and backed these up with entries on the GRO indexes. It has helped that the names weren't too common and they often had in laws etc staying with them on census night to bear out the relationships. Of course I have on occasion found out, when I check parish registers, that I have assigned a child to the wrong parents (though only once so far I have I had a totally unrelated family on the tree)- but I have a fairly good system for flagging up the people/events I am unsure of. It's then great to find the piece of evidence which confirms an educated guess. Judith

Olde Crone, Sorry about that - it wasn't intended to imply that all rellies are that easy to find, I was just using it as a demonstration of the time it would take to find convincing evidence for 100,000! If the 'average' rellie (whatever one of those may be) took a week to track down, that lot would take 274 years. As I said, I'm new to all this so the most extreme case I can offer is of some rellies who I've been pursuing for a few weeks with no success yet. Whether they'll turn up in a few more weeks, a few years or not at all I have no way of telling. One ggg-grandmother has proved an interesting case - of two fellow researchers I found with records of her, one had her born in Pembrokeshire and the other in Essex! Added to that, her birthdate seemed to fluctuate fairly wildly between censuses, she was born pre-civ reg, and no trace of her baptism has yet turned up. Then there's my gg-grandmother on the other side, who my dad thought probably had four or five children, until I found 11, and who gave her birthplace on the 1901 census as somewhere which, as far as I or anyone else has so far been able to find, doesn't exist. The only person of the right name and age who I have managed to trace back before her marriage turned up in 1861 living 100 miles or so away (it doesn't help that all that side of the family were located in Wales and mostly called Jones, Hughes or Evans). Then there's my grandfather's youngest sister, who is still alive and happy to confirm this, along with her date of birth and parents' names, to anyone who might enquire, but hasn't yet turned up in the civ reg... Generally I add any uncertain rellies to my tree in the hope that having them listed might lead to someone else managing either to prove or disprove the connection, but I recognise which ones are definite and which provisional! I'm with the nit-picking purists on that one, but due to an impecunious state likely to last the next few years (I'm about to start uni), I'll probably wait a bit before I start certifying anyone. Michael

Ooh Dwain!!! I should think my tree may be the same as many others? I started off about 10 years ago with a good idea of names and places on mums side going back four generations, but on dad's side, not even his parents names (well, I was told them, but one was wrong!). My tree now has most lines back to about 1800 and many a lot further. I have bought certs when I have needed to to resolve a problem and also am still in the process of buying each cert for all my direct line ancestors, because i told myself I would do that at the start. However, I still don't have my dad's death cert, because I know what's on it and the same goes for the certs for a few other known events, where it always seems more interesting to buy a different cert when I get £7 burning a hole in my pocket!! I also trace sibling families forward as well as backward when I can, using the BMD records and the census returns 1861-1901. I accept there could be errors in this and certainly omissions, but I do it in order to try and pick up living distant cousins who trace back to the same family groups. My tree at home tells me what level of accuracy I have ''awarded'' each event and the source for everything. After all that, hubby and I have about 4000 on our joint tree, both with these varying levels of accuracy. My son, aged 6, in getting interested, having found his 4xg-grandparents gravestone last week whilst his parents argued about where it should be situated!!! He keeps asking me how old this person or that person would be if they were still alive -excellent for my mental arithmetic skills!! What's the earliest anyone else wrote a tree? I was nine when I listed my dad's brothers and sisters - all 14 of them lol Sarah

I would image what quite a lot of these people are doing is what known as a 'one name study' whereby you 'gather up' everyone with a given surname and then tie them to each other, at lot of which is based on probability initially and then verified from various source. Jess * removed last paragraph -

The good thing about this thread is that it highlights just how subjective this hobby really is - what is fine by one researcher is considered woefully inadequate by another, in terms of the amount of ''proof'' needed to include a name on your tree. Whilst one person may be happy with family word of mouth along with a possible/probable name on the GRO index, another will want certificates, baptism entry, whatever. But in reality there is no such thing as absolute proof that you have selected the right ancestors for your tree. Even official documents contain errors, and yes people lied! And there are often ambiguities, especially with common names in big cities - so even if you have a birth cert for John Smith from Birmingham, that doesn't necessarily mean that he was YOUR John Smith! As you get further back, the amount of documentation available becomes less and less, and the contents of what there is becomes vaguer and less reliable. Sometimes the documentation is just not there to be found - for example if you've got gggm in the census and therefore have a good idea who her parents were, but for whatever reason you can't find a birth or baptism entry for her - then I certainly wouldn't end that branch of my tree with her, I would make the reasoned assumption about who her parents were and continue to trace back their lines. Likewise, I wouldn't leave gt-uncle Joseph off the tree just because I can't find his death certificate, nor will I spend hundreds of £ buying certs for umpteen cousins when I know that they existed and I'm 99% sure that I have the right entry on FreeBMD. But as I said, this is all personal preference. At the end of the day, it's just a hobby and I'm doing it for my own amusement, nothing more! By the way, I have 2698 names on my GR tree (all blood relatives or their spouses). I have around 300 certificates or PR photocopies, plus about 600 downloaded census pages as my ''proof''. Some of the more distant lines were provided by others, but I'm happy to accept their work until/if I ever get round to checking it myself. Richard

I have about 500 in my tree programme. I've been trying very hard not to go too far sideways, but it's very difficult not to when you find out something really interesting in a family. I like the documentation, not just the certs or the census stuff, but something that makes their lives real. Army papers, newspaper articles, obituaries and even divorce papers in one case...wonderful stuff! I have one lot who married in India (army) and had children at 3 different army bases before settling in England. I have now back got to the 'inevitable' John Smith (1825) on one line, so I guess that stops there for a while. Sylvia

Don't laugh about the John Smiths - I'm currently having problems with my dad's family due to him, his father and grandfather all being called David Jones.

I have just over 400 names, it has cost me ££££ and I can verify everyone in my tree. Its very satisfying to know they are definitely related, whats the point otherwise?! Its taken so much hard work to get this far, am proud that I have done it mainly alone and not just copied someone elses!!!