Stirnet

[Michael]

Does anyone have any experience with this, and in particular some idea of how reliable it is?

http://www.stirnet.com/genie/index.php

I've been researching two individuals (not in my own tree) who are commonly said to be uncle and nephew - it only took a few minutes on Ancestry to prove that they weren't that, but rather longer to connect what I could find on Ancestry to some Google results which, if the above site is taken to be correct, show that the two are actually twelfth cousins three times removed; I'm just wondering if that's a safe 'if'. I note that it does at least cite sources, unlike many online trees - in this case the main one is the Visitations of Norfolk (1563, 1589, 1613). The text of the Visitations is available online, so I should be able to check for myself.

[Olde Crone]

My experience of Stirnet is that, like everything else on the internet unfortunately, SOME of the information is accurate. You have to work out for yourself which bits are accurate and which aren't, lol....as usual.

Much of it is taken from sources like Burkes Peerage and Visitations which are of course self-reported pedigrees.

OC

[Michael]

Thanks OC. I've managed to locate much of the information in the Google Books copy of the Visitation, so I've at least bypassed any potential mistakes made in transferring the information onto Stirnet - thus reducing the question to whether the Visitation itself is accurate, which at 450 years distant and with no other source to cross-check the information against, may be a little tricky to determine...

[Mary from Italy]

Yes, the trees I've seen on Stirnet have also been taken from Visitations.

[Michael]

Thanks Mary. Having searched the Google copy of the Visitation, I find that - presuming the individual who supplied the information to the compiler can be relied upon - the relationship itself is correct (i.e. the two individuals are indeed 12C 3R), but whoever transcribed the information onto Stirnet got some of the names wrong and omitted dates of birth and death for others which were given in the Visitation. The Visitation also lays the information out in the usual shape of a tree - much easier to read than Stirnet's list with each generation indented, on which I find it difficult to keep track of which children belong to whom!

Incidentally, does anyone know what the process of updating the information was? The Visitation was made in 1563, but the tree shown in the online version shows individuals who died in the 1880s. Was it regularly added to, or did someone just go around again prior to the publication of the 1880s edition to update all the contents then?

[Olde Crone]

Michael

I have one pedigree from Stirnet which is taken from Visitations. It misses out all the embarrassing stuff, stuff which is actually vital for family history purposes and really does not make sense in its sanitised version. The truth emerged when I started to look at other documents, family papers and court proceedings etc.

There was also a fashion in Victorian times for people with more money than sense to commission a family tree. My great grandfather had one of these done and it is a tissue of fawning imagination without a shred of proof supplied. I expect other people also relied on these vanity trees and who knows whether they brandished them as "proof" of their lineage.

OC

[Michael]

Thanks OC. The section in the Visitation dealing with this particular bunch states that "the early part of the pedigree is involved in some confusion, which apparently has puzzled even such learned genealogists as Le Neve, Norris and Blomefeld; but the late Rev James Lee Warner, in his interesting and valuable account of this family published in Vol IX of Norfolk Archaeology, has cleared away many of these difficulties. The following descent is carried down to the present representative in the female line, to whom I am indebted for much information".

Of course, "cleared away many of these difficulties" may mean "made up the bits which didn't seem to make sense otherwise". I can verify as far back as 1770 or so from elsewhere, but for earlier than that the Visitation is the only source I have (I should probably mention that, since it isn't my own tree, I'm not intending to spend years checking it and certainly won't be trailing around ROs trying to piece things together from other sources - if I say that X and Y are 12C 3R and it turns out that some of the records which 'prove' that are wrong, tough luck, but at least it's better than the current widespread but totally false belief that they are uncle and nephew). As to vanity, the pedigree as stated in the Visitation doesn't have any royalty or nobility, but it does have a few toffs - some MPs, a sheriff and a Lord Mayor of London - from whom someone might well have wanted to show they were descended even if they weren't.