Below is an excerpt from an article by Rosemary Collins in the September 2025 issue of the Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine.
There is also a danger that the more people wrongly accept a hint and claim an ancestor as their own, the more people wrongly accept a hint and claim an ancestor as their own, the more this genealogical ‘fake news’ will spread. Kate Brial said: “A fellow member of Ancestry had claimed my 4x great grandmother as their own relative – along with all her descendants, too. Over the past four years I tried contacting them numerous times to ask them to recheck their research, because despite our ancestors having the same name, and being born about the same time, they were different people from different counties.
“After four years they finally acknowledged their error, but the damage had been done because AncestryDNA’s ThruLines tool now suggests we have a common ancestor, where there is none. What’s more, about 126 people have Ancestry trees that include my ancestor – and of those users, more than 50 of them have now added and accepted that the information presented by this person is correct.
“We must all check multiple sources, and remember: ‘Close enough isn’t good enough’.”
To avoid tree theft, remember to double-check your hints! Look at what records are backing up their ancestors’ biographies, and see if it’s the same person as your ancestor. And remember to apply critical thinking about whether it could be the right person – for instance, make sure that their dates of birth and death and the births of their children are plausible and conform to known timelines.
https://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/feature/family-tree-mistake
Submitted by Robin McCarthy
