CLEANING UP

Aug 3, 2012
There are some 2300 names on the family tree right now at Ancestry.com and over 4000 hints of possible matches to information from the 1940 census and other documentation.  I was going over them in no organized way, just following leads as they came up, when I noticed that one of our ancestors was only 5 years old when she gave birth to the ancestor in the next generation!!  So I had to start checking that out.  Then I noticed another ancestor who’s mother was even younger.  She had her son two years before she was born!! That’s right, the date of birth of one of our ancestors was shown as two years before his supposed mother’s birthday.   One or the other had to be wrong.   When I went back to check the source of the information I found that I had picked up the date of the mother’s birth  from another family tree on Ancestry.com.  This isn’t the first time that I’ve discovered these kinds of errors in family trees on Ancestry.com.  
I learned a long time ago to be skeptical of information from other family trees.  I did some searching for more information about the mother and actually found a record from France of her marriage … But it was NOT to the father of the son she was supposed to be the mother of.  That record did solve the age error though since it showed her date of birth as 20 years earlier than the date I had picked up from someone else’s tree. None-the-less, I deleted her, the son, and the father from the tree (and therefore all of their ancestors that I had in the tree) since I was not able to find any documentation other than several family trees that showed them as having any relationship to the generations that follow in our family.  
So I’m now undertaking to check out what documentation I have that actually supports the information I have about everyone.  Although these individuals may legitimately be in our lineage I am deleting everyone for whom I have no documentation other than someone else’s family tree.  I AM checking the other family trees to see if they have some documentation before deleting anyone from the our tree.  So after my next update to the information here there will be fewer names.  

Meanwhile, again, do not accept anything as fact without checking the documentation to see if it is proven.  MOST of the information is, but the further back in time that you go, the more likely you are to find information where I have not documented the source.