Starting to research your family tree can be daunting. There are millions of records online and it’s not easy to pick out the right ones to trace your ancestors’ lives.
Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine has plenty of advice to help you get started with family history research. But there’s one important risk to be wary of. All the major family history websites offer 'hints' where you can see suggestions for records with the same name as your relative. These also include individuals on other people's publicly available trees.
On Ancestry, a hint from another user's tree looks like this:
On Findmypast, it looks like this:
On MyHeritage, if you select 'Discoveries' at the top of the web page, you will see a list of discoveries that include matches with other users' trees, which look like this:
The problem is that simply because someone has the same name as your ancestor, that does not mean that they are the same person, or that the information about them is accurate. In the family history community, it's common for genealogists to complain about 'tree theft': where other users of family history websites accept their ancestors as their own without double-checking that it's correct.
Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine reader Bob Shaw said: "My tree is private, but there are still many that have been posted by others that are totally wrong. Obviously they have just been copied from other trees without doing any research, hence these errors go on ad infinitum, I have tried on several occasions to make contact to get them corrected, but most do not even bother to reply."
There is also a danger that the more people wrongly accept a hint and claim an ancestor as their own, the more this genealogical 'fake news' will spread. Kate Brial said: "A fellow member of Ancestry had claimed my 4x great grandmother as their own relative – along with all her descendants, too. Over the past four years I tried contacting them numerous times to ask them to recheck their research, because despite our ancestors having the same name, and being born about the same time, they were different people from different counties.
"After four years they finally acknowledged their error, but the damage had been done because AncestryDNA’s ThruLines tool now suggests we have a common ancestor, where there is none. What’s more, about 126 people have Ancestry trees that include my ancestor – and of those users, more than 50 of them have now added and accepted that the information presented by this person is correct.
"We must all check multiple sources, and remember: 'Close enough isn’t good enough'."
To avoid tree theft, remember to double-check your hints! Look at what records are backing up their ancestors' biographies, and see if it's the same person as your ancestor. And remember to apply critical thinking about whether it could be the right person - for instance, make sure that their dates of birth and death and the births of their children are plausible and conform to known timelines.
Will Buckland says: "When researching my wife’s ancestors, I struck a brick wall with John Jordan Derry senior, born 29 May 1854, because he disappears from the records after the 1901 census. Many online family trees put his date of death as 15 June 1918 in Flanders. I found it hard to believe that this man who disappeared from the records turns up as a dead infantryman in 1918 aged 64 having had no military experience. It only took a little more research to prove that the John Jordan Derry who died in Flanders was his son. This shows that public member trees should be treated with caution and perhaps a big pinch of salt!"
