May 3, 2024

Unlike many genealogists, I like online family trees. Whenever I start a new project, I begin by checking what’s available on the various family trees. I know that online trees are not always the most accurate source for genealogical information. However, they are the best place I know for quickly finding hints and clues about a person or family.

 

Having said that, online family trees can be a source of frustration. A genealogist should never incorporate anything found on one of them without verifying its accuracy. Sadly, many new and not-so-new genealogists neglect this important step.

 

Recently, I’ve been researching my fifth great grandfather Timothy Skinner. I’ve known where Timothy fits in my family tree for decades, but I’ve known almost nothing about his life. I began by checking the online trees on Ancestry, Family Search and My Heritage. Turns out there were a lot of them. There were nearly 2000 trees for him in Ancestry alone.

 

With so many trees to explore, I expected to find a wealth of information on Timothy and the rest of the Skinners. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Most of the trees were clones of each other. It appeared that someone had posted a tree, and everyone else had merely copied it.

 

This wouldn’t have been so bad if the original tree hadn’t been incorrect. It showed Timothy and his wife as the parents of ten children – born over a period of forty years. While it is possible for a man to father children for such a long period, women do not bear children for forty years. It only takes a quick look to see that the trees show Timothy’s wife having her first child at the age of twenty and her last at the age of sixty. Sixty isn’t an age at which women have children. That’s what all the trees indicated, though.

 

It’s possible that the original poster of Timothy’s tree made a mistake and overlooked the lengthy childbearing period that the tree showed. However, I do wonder why none of the people who copied that original tree noticed the error.

 

I suspect that some people merely copy information from other trees. They don’t even bother to check whether the information they’re copying makes sense.

 

Despite that, I still routinely check online trees. Often they’re a goldmine of information. I’ve found copies of documents and pictures I’d never seen before. Then there are the times, like with Timothy Skinner, that I find dozens of trees for someone. They’re all clones of one another, and all of them are wrong.

 

You never know what you’ll find on online trees, but it’s worth checking them anyway. Even if the information you find is bogus, it may still spur you to try to find out the real story.

 

Happy Hunting,

 

Carol Stetser

Researcher

Larimer County Genealogical Society