Has anyone else had any trouble with Ancestry.com being inaccurate?

Question

I tried to update Ancestry.com with my family tree information and I noticed that someone corrected it and made my grandfather and cousin linked to someone else's tree and I know for a fact that it isn't so the way they fixed it. How do you prevent this from happening? I thought it was for people to update their own personal tree not someone else's.

I think the most horrible violation of my family tree was when they changed around the people whom I am still in contact with as if they knew them or something!

Answer 1

How to prevent these things is a good question. Have you contacted ancestry.com?
As to their inaccuracies, yes, there are many, mostly because people can submit their own genealogies. Anything you find, treat with a grain of salt. National records were begun in the U.S. about the time of the Civil War. Other nations began theirs even later. (This means that persons such as myself can get records only from church records or individual family genealogies; there were no official records that far back.)
To compound things, records were written; wars caused the loss of many records (such as the Civil War); fires, termites, rats, you name it.
However, if you go back a few centuries, just about any name you can find is probably an ancestor of yours. So, perhaps the person "correcting" your tree found your ancestors on their tree, or, quite likely, they did not thoroughly research things and found the same or similar name and just assumed it was theirs. In my case, about 10 generations ago, I had 2 "grandmothers" with the same name born at the same time. They had the same grandparents (they were first cousins). Both were born in Germany; one immigrated to Virginia, the other remained in Germany. My point is, that until one researches from every which angle, it is difficult to know where people fit into their tree and people often don't spend enough time and effort.
Contact ancestry.com and report the situation and ask them what can you do (besides keeping your tree to yourself, which is what I do).

Answer 2

EVERY online genealogy site has the potential for mistakes, since submitted family trees are not an original source. Yet, many people coming into genealogy online, have never researched OUTSIDE of the internet. Thus, much of what you see as compiled family trees are little more than recycled from someone else's compiled tree. It has been a major issue for years. My personal research is not uploaded, for this reason. That does not mean that I don't share it with persons that I know have a legitimate interest in it.
Even with some of the other sites...it is possible for someone to download a gedcom, correct what they THINK are errors, and re post as their own.
I am sure many persons will take offense with my perspective. I live on the computer. At the same time, since I did much of my work pre internet, it helps me to be aware of some of the pitfalls. I refer persons to rootsweb frequently, and try to make sure that they see the files with NOTES AND SOURCES as being more likely to be good research.
It's a balancing game... to find the good sources of data, and weed out the problems.
If the tree in question is documented as YOURS, you can pull it completely, and re-post it, right?

Answer 3

Informtion submitted by people is not documented and must be taken as clues not as fact.

However, I have a big quarrel with One World Tree. Some people have fed their information directly into One World Tree but a lot of it is information that was put into Ancestry World Tree and Ancestry.Com has taken liberties with it by putting it into the One World Tree. They are putting in people with all the different information that various people have submitted but more than once I have found they combined two people into one. I have complained about it.

If I were you, I would delete all my family information out of One World Tree. Use Ancestry World Tree or the Public Member Tree or the Personal Trees, only you can put in information and you can also put in documentation. Only you are someone you have designated can make any changes, additions, deletions etc in these type of trees.

Now, it use to be when you made a correction to Ancestry World Tree it would be made within 24 hours. I have some that I made in January that they still haven't made. They say it is taking them much longer now.

I think they are adding a lot of new record information and expanding and they are not devoting the personnel to take care of the changes you make to the Ancestry World Tree.

Answer 4

Like Familysearch, Ancestry's contributed family info is sometimes kind of - well, inaccurate and I would take it with a big grain of salt. For example, someone put up my ggg grandfather and his children on familysearch, and the birthdate of the father was out by about 10 years, and would have had him marrying at age 13! I don't know who did this but I think it was via a posting I did on a message board years ago (I gave the correct marriage date so I don;t know how this happened). But back to your question - I don;t think you can prevent it - people will put out all kinds of stuff. I would contact Ancestry and tell them what you think happened. Then I would fix the error in your tree, I guess. And keep checking it. Good luck!

Answer 5

Is that the oneworldtree or some name like that? Yes it is screwy. They grabbed my database from the Online World Trees to start with and now I get emails from people about ancestors, names, I never heard of their system grafted??? onto that tree under my name. (I've even had some argue with me as if I did something!)

I use the free public trees. Period.

Today they've stopped the Online World Trees and really messed up.

Answer 6

It is! No one should be able to access your personnel tree without your permissoin only allow others to view it as a guest not as a contributer and such if you want just kick everyone off. I never heard of this but as with all genealogy people get stuck on one idea and run with it without proving it with documentation be very careful with the oneworld.tree on ancestry it is ripe with errors and no docuemtation people just put stuff in without doing the footwork to prove it.Hope it doesn't happen again if it does contact Ancestry to block certian users etc...