General Chat

I have just had contact with someone with over 30,000 names on their tree! How inadequate do I feel; after almost 8 years I have something over 200 (all authenticated) and this after a few blind alleys and a brick wall that has existed since day 1. 30,000+ ! I don't think I could find 30,000 if I went back to Adam. Are these people real?
Loz

Don't worry about numbers, it's how confident you are that the information is correct that is critical.

For instance, someone gave me births for two children in 1862 and 1869.
A couple of simple look-ups on Freebmd revealed that the supposed parents didn't get married until 1864 and the supposed father died in 1866, so neither are valid.

I contacted someone a couple of years ago who matched one of my grx3 grandmothers on a tree search. She had just uploaded a 26,000 name tree to GR had had literally hundreds of contacts as a result. She was answering every one and opening her tree.

I checked out the line I was interested in and everything did check out, from baptisms etc I had seen in Cornwall parish records on line. She could't say offhand how she was connected -- through more than one marriage, at least.

This is her hobby. She isn't a "name collector", she's someone who really enjoys doing the actual research, all of which she had double-checked, and sharing it with other people. She was about to start expanding it by going up the trees of the spouses of various distantly connected people in her tree.

On the other hand, I once spent some time on people who it turned out were no connection to me, right when I first started, because someone here at GR with a huge tree had a pair of my greatx2 grandparents in her tree. She was distantly related by marriage to one of their children. I had no idea at that point who my gr-grandfather's parents were -- I had only just got their given names from a census -- and I was brand new to the whole genealogy game, so I was thrilled. Until I started investigating, got my gr-grandfather's birth cert, and discovered she had picked a (shall we say) John Smith and Mary at random from the GRO marriage index in that county and assigned them to my gr-grfather as his parents. Took me months to get her to remove the incorrect people from her tree in various places on line.

As Brian says, definitely be wary, and do do your own double-checking. But you may run into someone who has actually done the research in parish records you don't have access to, for instance. The person should be able to tell you what their connection is and what the souce of the info is. You can usually tell from a short exchange of messages what someone is up to. ;)