Grievous mistakes
 

Making contact with a DNA match, I went back to my offline tree.

How glad I am that:

1. It is offline
2. Individuals are assigned unique identifying numbers

Whenever I put the information into the tree (probably on PAF and twenty odd years ago) I managed to conflate a man and his nephew. :eek: Or possibly when I merged two trees a few years back :o



This is down (I excuse myself!) with two individuals having the same year of burial, and no baptism in the expected parish.



Go on, admit your own folly, please! I begin to feel I should go through each ancestor now, as this is unlikely to be the only mistake.


I won't be so smug about Ancestry trees in future!

Assumption has always been my downfall.

My father spent a lot of time with his maternal grandmother and talked fondly of her. I entered her into my tree and spent many years and much ££££ tracing her family back 200 years - this was pre internet of course. Finally I constructed my internet tree and tidying up loose ends, was horrified to discover she was a late second wife to my great grandfather and no blood relative at all. 200 years worth of research gone to pot.

Another occasion which makes me burn with embarrassment is a comment I left on someone's ancestry tree about him having the wrong wife for someone. No he didn't have the wrong wife, I did, caught in my usual trap of parallel families.

OC

Probably my worst mistake, which completely destroyed my credibility with my correspondent (how was I to know, in those early internet days that two men with the same unusual name were independently living in the same RD) was telling him that his grandfather had a bigamous family :o:o:o

Not getting a marriage certificate because funds were tight about 30 years ago. Two families of the same surname in one small Staffordshire village. Both had a daughter Hannah of the right age. Plumped for one, yes guesswork, and OH went off to Stafford record office and researched the birth, marriage and deaths for this family in another part of Staffordshire. Can’t remember off hand where they came from. Many many years later I eventually bought that marriage certificate and I’d picked the wrong Hannah. The two families weren’t even related. This was 200 years of research wasted.

Then of course there is the elusive Peter Henry Harrison who on his marriage certificate says his fathers name is Thomas. Everyone reckons he was a Yorkshire man so the only Peter with a father Thomas was born in York. I researched the family, bought loads of certificates and traced them back to Ireland. OH made many trips to York. Then came the 1911 census and THAT Peter Harrison was still in York and ours in Ashby de la Zouch. More wasted time AND money.

I have just found a tree where a woman who appears to have died pre 1841 has allegedly gone back to her maiden name and survived at least 17 more years (well actually long enough to squeeze herself into a dress of a style popular some twenty years after that!)

And Ancestry doesn't recognise her birthplace as being in Hampshire, so they have shown it as Berkshire.

Feel better about myself now

My biggest mistake was researching the wrong Lenhart family for several years, thinking they MUST be my grandfather's family because of the unusual name although there was no birth record for him and he never appeared on any census with them. Apart from the name I did have the excuse that the family story was that his family had a shop in London and these people had a tobacconist and confectionary shop in Tottenham. I now know they were nothing to do with my family who were actually Americans from New York but I didn't find that out until after I had bought lots of certificates and compiled quite an extensive file of information for the wrong family. I still have it.

I started a thread recently about finding an ancestor, and tracing her family through several generations, only to find her burial as a young child. Not totally my fault as FMP had indexed the different spelling of her surname in the burial differently to her birth surname spelling. Still a rookie mistake I should have known better not to make.
Like you OC, I have traced my Swedish great grandfather's lineage back to the 1600's, only to find there may be some doubt whether he is actually the father of my grandmother. Currently waiting on the results of DNA testing.

For a time, I followed someone else's research and had Thomas Collis born in Wokingham who married a woman from Ruscombe and they settled at Hurst St Nicholas. He had a brother called Farmborough Collis who was left nothing in their father's Will for his continued wicked ways - I think I rather liked Farmborough!

It bothered me though, why Thomas was buried in Sparsholt Hampshire, for no apparent reason. So much so that I trawled through the records of Sparsholt and found a baptism there for another Thomas Collis, and for his eventual daughter-in-law.

Following that trail, I found Wills, and further baptism and marriage records. The trail led eventually to Thomas Collis in Hurst at Whistley Mill.

I still wish Farmborough was part of our family!

I made a great discovery and married Mary off, she had kids and all.

I went back to the tree to discover her husband was rather remarkable, having been born, married and died all by the age of 6.

I still haven't discovered Mary's fate.