People who copy and paste random stuff onto their trees- why?

[needsomewarmsunshine]

Why do they do this? I know that it is open to debate sometimes what is correct, but...
Copy and pasting random stuff, most of which is obviously not correct. ie. 3 baptisms before birth different areas of the country. mixed up life events and living to 140 are some recents I've found from Ancestry family trees.
Why do genealogy then not research or at least read what your tree pages? A lot of them don't make sense.

I am guessing this is a somewhat niche thread and you’re having an issue with a family member doing precisely this?! 😆

My estranged uncle has so many mistakes on his trees which he has blindly copied from other trees. No research. Oh how I laugh 😆

It's happened to me recently too. Went into my family tree (that I'm working on) to find two entries relating to my grandparents that had managed to misspell their names and get key dates wrong. Where on earth had it come from, I wondered?! Who would even bother to do that?

I corrected them. I hope I'm not going to be facing something akin to a Wiki Editor war, or a tangle with a very crap bot.

Honestly?
Stupidity

Many, if not most, people don't know how to conduct historical any genealogical research. As you've noticed, many people just stick any matching name onto their tree without even bothering to read the details.

Of those who at least do the basic reading of a possible match, few actually do the research needed to verify the information & ensure they've found the correct person.

Oh yes! No evidence of any of it.
I found someone who had what appeared to be an earlier ancestor of mine in their tree, but their information differed from what I had been led to believe about the identity of the person, and when I contacted them to query it, they just said that they understood the person went by both names.
I asked if they had any documents showing the interchangeable names, but they didn't.

In case I my explanation is unclear let's call my ancestor Fred Bloggs. Fred appears out of nowhere on the census and his marriage certificate says his father was Joe Bloggs.
Random bloke on ancestry has my Fred Bloggs but with father Joe Smith Bloggs. Joe Smith Bloggs is from a different area and there is no documentation to show that he is the father of Fred, or that he used Smith or Bloggs interchangeably.

I very much err on the side of not adding something unless I know for sure it's corroborated and triple checked. Doesn't mean I don't make mistakes, and it also means that there are branches which are empty, because, for example, the names are too common to give certainty. But I'd rather be very confident in what I have than just add data to look like I've got a lot.

I ranted about just this on another thread a few months ago. There's someone in America who has copied the whole of DP's tree based on the wrong assumption that his grandad emigrated to America in the 1950's. I thought I was being helpful pointing this out and even provided details of the man with the same name from the same city who emigrated but she's not having any of it.

Wish it was, there are so many people doing it, these were examples from trees I've come across this morning. On here to vent because so many trees are totally useless.
I'm the one whose doing my husbands and mine trees. I also work in genealogy as part of my job.

Drives me nuts, but I think it’s just clicking hints on Ancestry (especially if they don’t know the UK area and can’t see that a record doesn’t fit) and just making assumptions.

I work on Legacy on my computer and upload to Ancestry periodically just to share with contacts, I have found that occasionally Ancestry changes the place names of its own accord, eg some of my Norfolk ancestors were listed as dying in Norfolk, Virginia! So at times it may be Ancestry’s error.

how do you know it’s nonsense and made up?

and your job involves this? 😕

I think people want to do their family tree but can't be bothered to do the proper research so just accept the first piece of information they find and don't care if it's true or not.

So frustrating! I think there are probably several things going on. Lots of people just don't understand genealogy and that clicking random hints on websites isn't the professional way to go about things. Others have really poor geography knowledge and don't stop to think that Birmingham, Warwickshire and Birmingham, Alabama are not the same place and therefore it's unlikely that someone is in both places at the same time.

Also - and this is something I have seen particularly in Scottish genealogy groups - people from other parts of the world are DESPERATE to prove a link to someone like William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, Mary Queen of Scots, Rob Roy... anyone they've seen in a film. So will click the most tenuous hints in an attempt to add these people into their line. They don't care if it's not accurate. I even had a bit of a row with someone on a FB group recently who was absolutely adamant that the James Fraser she was allegedly descended from was the same Jamie Fraser in the Outlander programme. Well no, because he's fictional. But you can't reason with batshit.

Yes it does, I research for a company to locate relatives and heirs of will bequests, where there is no obvious relative to be found or alive.
There is a lot of nonsense on Ancestry [the one I use for my personal trees, I have been told via 3 trees that my grandfather died 6 years ago in hospital for instance. Well, that would have made him 116 years of age, and he died on the seatee at home. I was with him. But no, apparently random strangers know better...

It doesn't help that Ancestry is set to the US first and you have to change everything to the UK. It's easy to get it wrong. I was looking at a friend's tree and found his granny had apparently been married in Honiton, Devon, then skipped over to Honiton in Jamaica to have a baby and then come back to Honiton in Devon for the baptism!
Also, people have their own ways of doing things - doing my own tree I realised that a relative was putting everyone he didn't have a death date for as dying at 100 years old. These incorrect dates inevitably got carried over into other people's trees as gospel.

So frustrating. Someone completely unrelated to me has my Nan in their tree, married to someone who isn’t my grandad but with her parents and siblings correct. I sent them a message to say that they had got it wrong and they never replied. There is absolutely no way she can have been married to the person they have her listed as married to - they are Just Wrong and it is so frustrating that their tree and a couple of linked ones show up in my hints from time to time…

I

I gave them the correction but they insisted they were right. These people are not even on my tree.

Why are you so intent to pick holes, @TheFluentReader ? Anyone who uses ancestry knows that there are people out there with tens of thousands of people on their trees. People who aren't just interested in tracing a direct line but also creating a web of tracing all siblings, and their spouses, and the spouses families and so on. Some of the links are tenuous to say the least. Also there is nothing stopping a user getting the wrong George Walker or Alice McKenzie and adding your direct relative to their tree.

I use Find My Past. I don't think I've seen one Tree connected to any of my families that doesn't have errors. Often complete nonsense, such as a man married to two women at the same time, or a woman having children long past the age when she would have been able to. And these errors are copied from one tree to another by people who accept hints without stopping to think about it.

And yes, a lot of Americans who clearly aren't familiar with UK geography.

Intent on picking holes?

It's not subjective, you know. These are binary facts - they're either right or they're wrong.

I missed the deleted posts.

Re people not familiar with geography - another gripe from me - how long does it take to pull up a map on google and take a quick look to see how close these places are? I do it a lot to try to make a judgement call on "potential people" (I have a couple of families with very common surnames).
Also, it isn't difficult to tag the people in Ancestry as 'Hypothesis' or 'Unverified' - I do this in the absence of documents confirming identity.

Some people just don't care about it being accurate though @TeabySea. They are like click and collect genealogists, they just want to connect as many people to their tree as they can. Or prove a link to a celeb or historic figure.

One thing I always do when I am searching for someone and they pop up on other people's trees is to look at how many sources/documents they have linked to that person. Most of the rubbish trees have no linked census, baptism, probate records at all.