The scope of unsound genealogy lineages online reflects careless treatment of what traditionally has been a serious pastime for Americans. Genealogy has, for decades, been rated in the top three hobbies. It is particularly attractive to retirees, who often combine it with travel to locations where ancestors lived.
Online Genealogy
When genealogy became an online phenomena it attracted less careful adherents, some of whom rated their success on how many ancestors they could collect, but not always upon how correct the pedigrees they assembled were.
The biggest advantage the internet brought to experienced genealogical researchers was not the capacity for collecting ancestors, but instead the access to databases. It is therefore ironic that most compilers of online family trees are not citing sources even though it is now much easier to access them.
Born 33 Years Before His Father!
There is online via ancestry.com a series of family trees for a man we will call Wilbert Wonderman. The story is true, but the names are not. Wilbert was born in 1645, 33 years before his father. His father, Wilbert, was born in 1678, as was his son, also named Wilbert.
It gets worse. If one looks closer it becomes apparent that the Wilbert sandwiched in the middle really has his son identified as his father and his daughter-in-law as his mother. In other words, the couple given as his parents are really Wilbert's son and his wife. In that context, the dates are correct.
Detecting Mistakes
People should be able to read this sort of botched up tree and know right away that it is full of errors. Someone's parents just couldn't have the same names and dates as one's son and daughter-in-law!
A woman who had a child in her online tree born to a 60-year-old mother, when confronted, had two excuses: 1) It was only a "sideshoot" of her tree, and 2) she is too busy being a mother and wife. She also explained that it is good for groups of people to work together--she meant copy-catting each other's data--because it lifts the fog that supposedly hangs over ancestral heads!
Out of Control Proliferation of Wrong Info
Back to the man born 33 years before his father and having the same people in the generation before him as those in the generation after him: The surname in question is not an extremely common one, yet about 70 people copied this obviously incorrect data into their own online family trees. The hunt to capture quantities of ancestors apparently is so frantic that the captured material isn't even read!
This is but one example of hundreds of similar faulty trees being copied willy-nilly in the internet hunting ground. One problem with this procedure is that both lineages stretching back in time, as well as lines of descent, are built block by block, each generation determining what comes before it and follows after it. That means one mistake can often invalidate an entire family tree, making whatever preceeds or follows that generation irrelevant. Passing such material on to others is irresponsible.
The Old Fashioned Way
It has long been a hallmark of genealogy that each generation was painstakingly documented by citations of records from primary source material. Some people worked years on 300 or 400 ancestors. Now, some of those who grow online trees often boast of hanging 62,000 ancestors on their tree. It is obvious that many of these online ancestor sleuths are opting for quantity, not quality.
Beware!
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