If there are "0 Sources" then ... ???
Pardon the newbie question ... I can click and follow my family tree back to before the birth of Christ lol, but with zero sources ... how is any of this verified or useful? Here's the "ancestor" in question: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/GVF6-3MC
Thanks so much for explaining!
Answers
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The fact that you question the authenticity of this claim, makes you at least an advanced newbie.
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I think a great place to start is close to you and prove or verify your branch of the tree. Look for every source your can for your most recent deceased ancestor, his wife and children. Then do that again for his parents, her parents, etc.
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I wonder what name generator the contributor used.
The descendancy chart is ...painfully amusing. "Mrs. Beorn West Saxons". "Mrs. Aldhelm of England". Gotta love it.
There's a lovely loop a little below that; I suppose you could use it for practice in finding and disconnecting incorrect relationships.
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I have a similar problem and I think it's far from amusing. The concept of the shared tree is great, until you see how many people add data with zero sourcing. Sometimes, the reason they know the data is accurate is "gedcom." That's it. No information about what gedcom, who created it, where it resides, or, even more important, what was the creator's source for the information?
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The first time I followed my line back, I ran into Ragnar Lothbrok and the entire cast of Vikings. True story.
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What a coincidence! Me, too. We're related. Ha, ha. Supposedly, I'm also related to King Richard III, Princess Diana, Muhammad Ali, Elvis, and the late Queen Elizabeth.
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“Sometimes, the reason they know the data is accurate is "gedcom.” “
I treat that as the genealogical equivalent of “Because I said so.”
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When the reason is "Gedcom," that is an auto-generated reason. The individual uploading the Gedcom did NOT add that and probably doesn't even know that has been placed in the reason field for every name added to the tree in that upload.
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My line goes back to a man born in 165BC. His son was born 5 years later in 160BC. His father was born in 120BC, that is 45 years after he was born!
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@Cynthia1224 and @RobertWaddell1
Like all genealogy sites, Family Tree is full of Serious Genealogy and Fun And Games and everything in between.
Serious Genealogy is your grandparents who are in Family Tree with full documentation, full sources, and so much information that anyone trying to create or import a duplicate of any quality at all are immediately stopped by the system. Their information is highly reliable and stable.
Fun And Games are those lines back to King Arthur about whom advanced scholarship cannot agree if he ever existed at all, if he did then who he was or what he did. Multiple copies exist of these vague people and too many people have just copied out information from Tennyson's poems or Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur," neither of which are exactly sources. This part of the tree also suffers from users who can't stand a blank spot and so patch gaps with made up names.
You are not going to be able to do much with those foggy areas of the tree, other than add even more confusion, unless you can personally read:
or worse and are able to decide if this is actual history or romantic poetry.
Family Tree has a rather unique challenge above and beyond other sites because it contains every bit of contributed family data ever submitted to FamilySearch since it first opened in 1894 as the Genealogical Society of Utah. Older submissions did not require or preserve sources. It was only when Family Tree opened in 2012 that there was any decent sourcing method at all. So in Family Tree, you have 118 years of submitted research when there was no ability to include sources.
So enjoy the Fun And Games with a quintal of salt but work where you can actually do some good.
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When a GEDCOMs is used to add someone to Family Tree notes and sources do not get transferred. So just because the "new ID" has no documentation doesn’t mean the person who uploaded the file did not add sources in the software used to create the GEDCOM upload.
However, many don’t understand that the compare process is a one-by-comparison, which takes effort to do properly.
Many software applications which create GEDCOMs allow users to sign into FamilySearch and compare information in their own personal database with Family Tree without the need to export a .ged file & import to FamilySearch, then compare.
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