re: #179 freetoken

Genome hacker uncovers largest-ever family tree

The researchers pulled trees off of Geni.com .

The problem with geni.com, though, and this is true for any “free” internet site hosting family trees, is that the trees almost certainly are full of lies. Not all are intentional lies, and some are just research or transcription errors, but there are falsehoods at every turn. That’s why quality genealogy searches for the paper trails, and then can be supplemented with DNA.

Oh, fer sure! A couple years back, my wife got into looking up her family, which got me interested in mine. I found a relative had built up a tree of my paternal grandmother’s family that went back to the 16th Century in Germany. One problem - absence of names. This led me to conclude that whoever did it had papered over gaps, connecting our family with people who shared a last name, but were not definitively related to us.

And I’ve seen folks hook into my tree, finding someone who seems like they might be their relative, but when you look closely they couldn’t be, like the one who decided my Great Grandfather’s sister, Ida May, who died at 16 of Typhus, was their Great Grandmother, and so they added two more generations to their tree that didn’t belong.