How to verify lineage that goes back to the 400's ?
I'm fairly new to Family Search so I'm not really sure how this all works. I just went to my Family tree and was I ever surprised to find on my paternal grandmother's lineage, ancestors going all the way back to the 400's. How is that possible and is this my real lineage? If it is, where is the documentation coming from and is it correct?
Answers
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It is almost certainly completely unverifiable, the only real exception being if you have a verifiable (via reliable sources) family connection to a family that is notable enough to have been studied by academic historians sufficiently to be traceable right back. Even with that caveat the fifth century feels like a bit of a stretch. Welcome to the craziness that is much of the FS Family Tree pre (say) 1700.
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There are families in Asia that have lineages going that far back, but they're strictly patrilinear, and (as far as I know) they record just names and nothing much else. I think some of the Korean ones are on FS? Maybe? There may also be some Chinese families entered, but the FS website is inaccessible in China, so I imagine it'd be extremely difficult to properly document anything here. Japan also severely restricts online genealogy (in the name of privacy, I think), so their lineages are unlikely to show up here.
For European ancestors, as Mandy says, anything before about 1700 is likely to be shaky, and anything non-royal before about 1500 is likely to be basically fictional. (The "fictional" label may also apply to royalty; it's just generally Really Old fiction, and hence gets treated with more respect than is perhaps warranted, genealogically speaking.)
Everything is user-submitted on FamilySearch's collaborative and open-edit Family Tree. Theoretically, all entries can (and should) have sources attached, or at least described/mentioned; FS provides several very good tools for the purpose. In practice, many users make no use of any of them. Also, there are parts of the Tree that predate the sourcing tools: FS imported all of the data from all of their previous systems, but the current Tree is really the first of those to offer full sourcing.
What this all boils down to is that the answer to "how reliable is it?" is "it varies". Some users do very good work and make full use of all of the available tools and sources; others … well, less so. Most of us fall somewhere between those extremes, hopefully closer to the first than the second.
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Be very sceptical of stuff that goes a long way back (and no, i'm not going to define "a long way back" because "It depends…")
You'd expect a group about medieval genealogy to be experts in their field and to have an agreed story. However quite the most unpleasant exchanges I have ever seen in a genealogy site were on a medieval genealogy message board where an argument was taking place over the parentage of a Byzantine princess. I'd only looked in for interest's sake but vowed for the sake of my sanity never to go there again. And this was nothing like as far back as the 400s!
So, right here, right now, treat your line back to the 400s as an amusement, nothing more. It's virtually impossible to get back to the 1400s unless your ancestors are royalty or major aristocrats.
What you need to do is to start with your paternal grandmother and do the boring stuff about checking each step and each date for each event. Pay attention to whether the Mary Smith who marries someone is really the same as the Mary Smith in her current baptism, or has someone matched two people of the same name who actually lived 200 miles apart?
Personally, I'd do all your checking and record your results outside FamilySearch FamilyTree - you stand a better chance of keeping everything together that way. It may sound boring but it's important to get Gran's story right, isn't it? Good luck!
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Thank you Mandy, Julia and Adrian for your response. It's all so interesting and fun to image that my Lineage does go back to the 400's (Spain and France) and is filled with Spanish Kings, Queens, Princesses and Barons and their descendants eventually ended up being sugar cane laborers in Puerto Rico in the 1850's.
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