On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:27:49 +0100, Ruth Wilson <[email protected]> wrote: >snipped >> >> MARRIED 17 Nov 1839, to ANDERSON, Bridget, Born 19 Nov 1819 in >> Whitehaven, CUL, ENG, Died 19 Aug 1876 in Whitehaven, CUL, ENG >> at age 56; FATHER: ANDERSON, John >> ANCESTRY: Gives only the years, but says they were married in >> Cumberland, Illinois United States instead of Whitehaven, >> Cumberland, England -- otherwise correct. >> >> >> The person who compiled the tree probably made the mistake of linking the >> wrong husband and father. >> >> But would he have mangled the place names like that? >> >> I suspect that that is something that the Ancestry.com software has done all >> on its own, and that if you entrust Ancestry.com with your genealogy data, >> something similar is likely to happen to it. > >I've seen a few similar cases - I don't know, but I've always suspected >that the person adding the information has just clicked the first >default place name without considering common sense. > As seen where the same person appears across several trees, it seems to be greatly encouraged by a failure to terminate the place description with the country name. It also looks as if the "auto-complete" works differently in .com and .co.uk resulting in favouring the home country for the particular version of Ancestry if only a town name is entered. In the cases where I seem to have been the first to add a person's record to Ancestry, the placenames generally get through the system unmolested until someone either allows what is shown in a census record to replace the original description (generally killing off the country) or makes their own "correction". >Someone has added my Carlisle born and bred gt gt grandmother to a >London based family; I've seen others where I assume the user has added >eg census returns that "might" be the ancestor, so having them in 2 >places at once. I suppose that's okay if you are using it as a filing >system and putting things there for later evaluation. > >Online family trees are fine - just don't add other people's rubbish to >your own carefully researched, sourced and recorded data! (and add the >occasionally scathing note to the rubbish?) > >Ruth

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:12:19 +0100, Charles Ellson <[email protected]> wrote: >On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 13:27:49 +0100, Ruth Wilson ><[email protected]> wrote: >>> I suspect that that is something that the Ancestry.com software has done all >>> on its own, and that if you entrust Ancestry.com with your genealogy data, >>> something similar is likely to happen to it. >> >>I've seen a few similar cases - I don't know, but I've always suspected >>that the person adding the information has just clicked the first >>default place name without considering common sense. >> >As seen where the same person appears across several trees, it seems >to be greatly encouraged by a failure to terminate the place >description with the country name. It also looks as if the >"auto-complete" works differently in .com and .co.uk resulting in >favouring the home country for the particular version of Ancestry if >only a town name is entered. It seems that this autocomplete is a highly dangerous feature that ought to be removed, since it seems to be so frequently misused, as in the example I gave. >In the cases where I seem to have been the first to add a person's >record to Ancestry, the placenames generally get through the system >unmolested until someone either allows what is shown in a census >record to replace the original description (generally killing off the >country) or makes their own "correction". I sent a GEDCOM of my wife's branch of a family to a researcher who descended from a brother of the man in the example I gave. The person to whom we sent it had sent us a GEDCOM of her branch, which I incorporated into our rough research file and began checking. She seems to be a careful researcher, and to have documented her work thoroughly, so I doubt that she would go randomly changing data for no reason. Yet when she incorporated the GEDCOM I sent her into her tree on Ancestry.com, several people seemd to get mixed up and inaccuracies were introduced, not just in the place names, but in the relationships and dates of events. -- Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk