How accurate is my family tree when I go back 15 generations or more?

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This discussion was created from comments split from: Family Tree.

victorscholes

I have a question that maybe you can answer i have been trying to follow my family tree with some succcess and am wondering whether you can follow your records backwards up the tree .

my father and grand farther following back I know the g/g grandfather and am happy with that that but can i go backwards to his father for instance, currently I am back about 15 generations but not sure of accuracy.

any comments would be appreciated

Vic Scholes

Paul W

@victorscholes

In theory, there is no real limit to the amount of generations you can trace back with your ancestral lines. However, the further you do go the more difficult it will probably be in establishing firm evidence regarding the true identity of your ancestors.

Most of my research relates to my English ancestry. In some cases I have been fortunate to find wills, over a number of generations, that name children / grandchildren, etc., and in one or two branches this has led to my tracing lines back to individuals born in the 16th and even 15th centuries - well before the official commencement of parish register recordings. However, in one case, the earliest document I have (for a branch on my maternal side) is for 1822!

Only you (though possibly in collaboration with other researchers with shared interests / ancestry) can decide if the evidence is strong enough to link you - and your most distant "proven" ancestor - with those still further back. As suggested, wills, parish registers and perhaps other papers that have been preserved (either in local or national archives) will help in your research.

Try, where possible, not to rush, or to rely too much on hearsay. I am still working hard in trying to establish positive links within many braches of my family tree - and that is after thirty five years of research, which has taken me to record offices in different parts of England and involved many hours in local libraries and on my home computer.

I wish you success with your searches, but would stress the need to take care, as it is so easy to confuse individuals of the same name and similar identity, who you might initially consider a very good match for your own relatives and ancestors, but transpire to be only distantly connected to your family.

Gail Swihart Watson

So, I will add a little to this discussion, in the context of the question about how accurate relationships and records are the further back you go. The answer is the further back you go, the less you can be sure of anything. That is why many, many lineage societies have established rigid standards of proof dealing with time and location. If you are working with someone who lived in the 1600s and you want to be proven as a descendant, there will be various rules to be adhered to, depending on what part of the world that 1600's ancestor lived in. Also, professional genealogists learn about the standards of proof, and that too gets customized depending on time and place.

So, at this point we are at a fork in the road. Do you want to verify lineage for a specific reason, such as membership in a lineage society, or do you simply want to do family history to the best of your ability? I take the second route. Some of my family appears to have very colorful people who have been major players in history, and I will occasionally send out chatty emails about the history, using a possible personal connection as a hook. I always say though, that the lineage is not proved.