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I just have to shake my head.

Donald Newcomb
Donald Newcomb ✭
June 30, 2021 edited July 18, 2024 in Family Tree

Is there any way to prevent people from entering completely undocumented lines to royalty? I was following a recently entered line that purported to connect to Edmund Beaufort (ca 1406-1455). "Oh my. There's a gateway I hadn't seen before." Fortunately I have a copy of Weis' "Ancestral Lines" to check and Edmund's daughter, Eleanor, didn't marry who this contributor said she did. I left comments, for all the good it will do.

Unfortunately there's been so much wishful thinking, if not downright fraud, surrounding royal descent over the years, it's hard to sort out fact from fiction and many people fall for the fictions. :/

Tagged:
  • Sources
  • life sketch
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Best Answer

  • cmillionaire
    cmillionaire ✭✭✭
    June 30, 2021 Answer ✓

    @Donald Newcomb

    Honestly, there's not much you can do except to remove the link. This also reiterates the importance of attaching sources (something we could all probably do a little better on :) )

    0

Answers

  • Paul W
    Paul W ✭✭✭✭✭
    June 30, 2021 edited June 30, 2021

    @Donald Newcomb

    Many records within Family Tree that relate to royalty / nobility are read-only (aka "locked").

    How FamilySearch deals with the records of these and certain other figures - such as LDS Church leaders and famous actors, politicians, etc., - appears to be rather arbitrary, but I believe requests can be made to "lock" records of individuals such as the one mentioned here.

    Family Tree is not alone in containing many errors relating to such persons, of course. I decided to check Wikipedia to "confirm" the pedigree of an English "nobleman" and there were several contradictory statements even within that main article on him.

    I gave up keeping a watch (now known as "following") some individuals who fell into this category, as their profiles became a jumbled work of fiction - with children added who were older than their parents and marriages that took place when they were about six years old!

    I long came to the conclusion that these individuals are best left well alone: as fast as you get their records sorted in line with historical facts, someone will come along and reverse your inputs, to suit their own, crazy theories.

    1
  • Donald Newcomb
    Donald Newcomb ✭
    June 30, 2021

    I just spent an hour of my life fixing a mess where one of my gateway ancestors in Massachusetts had been linked to parents in Virginia, despite the fact that EVERY authority shows otherwise. It makes me despair for the concept of being able to "crowd source" genealogy, the way Family Tree is attempting to do. Now, for people after about 1800, things seem OK. It's before then that we seem to enter La-La-Land.

    1
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