Is all this a scam??????
LegacyUser
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Greg Washam said: It's really funny, but according to your site I am related to George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmi Hendrix, John Kennedy, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln,FDR, Thomas Jefferson, Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando, Thomas Edison, and just about every famous person and president I type in to your search engine. Could all this be true??????
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Answers
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Jordi Kloosterboer said: It could be, or people could have put fictions connections in there. You can validate the connections to see if they are true by doing your own research.0
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Brett said: Greg
I am just another User/Patron of "FamilySearch" like yourself.
Other Users/Patrons in this Forum often, like; and, are able to, "Help".
Firstly, welcome to this Forum.
Secondly, just to be clear ...
Are you talking about using the BYU program of "RelativeFinder" with "Family Tree"?
Because, I believe that you are.
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Gordon Collett said: The information is based on the family relationships as listed in FamilySearch Family Tree. It is only as accurate as the information there. Keep in mind that Family Tree is an open-edit, wiki-style universal tree managed by everyone that wants to contribute and help out. Each relationship is only as good the the research applied to it and the sources verifying it. One wrong assumption or just plain guess - of which there can be more and more the farther back you go - would break your relationship chain.
With that caution, lets assume that every relationship link connecting you to these people is verified and correct. Then yes, you are related to them all. Where ever you are seeing this, you should be able to bring up a view that traces back each line to your common ancestor. That ancestor will likely be in the New England region of the United States in the 1600s or England in the 1400s.
For example, to take the first name on your list, here is how I am related to George Bush:
Eight cousin doesn't sound all that far back, but it is. Pres. Bush and I reportedly meet at Thomas Cadwell, b. 1638 in Connecticut and his wife Elizabeth Stebbins b 1631 in England.
If you find it hard to believe you could be related to so many people, you will probably find this article very fascinating:
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/a...0 -
Juli said: Another thing to keep in mind: I don't know what exactly you're using to find these relationships, but the collaborative trees (FS FT, WikiTree, WeRelate, Geni) often talk about connections between people. These include relatives by marriage, meaning that you can be connected to people with whom you share no common ancestor. Such links just indicate that your part of the great common tree has lots of descendants who have used that particular collaborative platform.0
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Virginia Florence Horvath said: It very well could be true it depends on how far back you are willing to go as well as the documentation behind it.
Some relationships are closer then others. For example my 3rd Great Grandfather was orphaned at age of 8, his legal guardian until he turned 18 was the grandfather of Lyndon B Johnson. One of his sisters along with an aunt married into the Bush family. All of these facts are very well documented in court papers and vital records. A different line of mine leads back to Ethan Allen, not documented (yet) but told down though the generations on my Allen line.0 -
JT said: The Barbara Pierce shown above ("1925-Deceased LVFT-H7V") as George W Bush's mother doesn't exist in that ID (which showed a missing death year). The real Barbara Pierce record is "8 June 1925 – 17 April 2018 LBP1-5WP".
Most of the time I am related to people only thru my wife's line, which has some Charles Wight guy ("1831–1911 KWVS-HNZ) and his wife Sarah Loveless which had ancestors in the 1600's who a lot of US residents descended from. But Relative Finder doesn't supposedly use non-blood-line relationships to show a blood-line connection.
But yes Greg, sometimes I wonder if Relative Finder isn't stretching the truth just a teeny bit here & there. I've seen it use distant direct-line relatives that I don't see actually existing in my tree. So take it with a grain of salt, and just view BYU's Relative Finder as something fun to play around with for a short while, before getting back to serious research that is worth-while.
https://fhtl.byu.edu/0 -
Gordon Collett said: Regarding Jon's comment above:
Relative Finder, in order to speed performance, caches a section of your relatives in Family Tree and uses that to create its charts. It is not using live data from Family Tree. When I signed on yesterday, a notice popped up that I had not refreshed my information for three months and to go into settings and do so. I didn't bother and it has actually been well over a year since I have looked at Relative Finder. That is why the chart used an old version of Barbara Pierce with less information that must have been merged in with a duplicate since her ID has changed.
This use of out of date, cached data is probably why you, also, have seen charts in Relative Finder that have direct line ancestors that are no longer present in Family Tree. Corrections must have been made that were not updated in Relative Finder.
The relationship charts in Family Tree will always use the current Family Tree data, which is why I haven't used Relative Finder in so long. However, Family Tree does not let you view relationships to living people whereas Relative Finder does show relationships to certain living public figures such as living US presidents.
Here is an example of Family Tree's relationship chart using the first deceased, non-president on Greg's list, Jimi Hendrix. I'm related to him, also:
Here our common ancestors are back in the mid-1530s.
I agree with Jon, this is fun but of limited usefulness other than reminding us we are all in this world together and for just the occasional weird fact, such as that I am related to both Pres. Barack Obama and Pres. Donald Trump. In fact, using the "Connect Two Deceased People" function in Relative Finder, you can determine that Pres. Obama and Pres. Trump are related to each other through their mothers in several different ways:
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