How much can you trust??


Maya
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How much can you trust others genealogy? I am in One Great Family and I really like a lot the function where it authomaticly unite families if you have one familymember that is the same. Now I got my husbands line all the way to Adam and Eve... through Seth, Enok, Jared, Enos, ... Noa, Also James Jesus brother, Odin and Freia... two figures in the Norwegean mythology, Kings from BC around 200-300 ad, James stuart, Bloody Mary, French, Italian, English kings, cesars in Rome, Pharaos.... over 128 generations.... :eek:

Has people really been able to go so far for certanity or is there a LOT of mistakes ... I suppose T should check every, and each one by myself to be sure.... what a work!

I wonder can I contaqct the one who did that genealogy to discuss with him/her....

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Short answer: You can't trust the European royal genealogies. In fact, I seem to remember that the Church doesn't allow work to be done for people born before the early Renaissance or late middle ages. Can't back this up, but it seems I came across this when I was doing genealogy for my wife fifteen years ago. Can anyone else confirm or correct this?

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Vort-

My Dad ran into issues with family members in the 1600s roughly 15 years ago as they said 95% of that work for that time period was done. It was frustrating for him and he had to go through some "red tape" but in the end it was all done.

Mailis-Good luck with it and welcome to the frustrating side of genealogy. There is SOOOOO much out there with little backing it up

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I think you can trust it completely, Mailis. I bet you really -are- descended from Odin and Freya, two mythical deities from Norse mythology.

I'm descended from a long line of leprechauns and unicorns.

That was a bit rude. :(

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I admit I am just getting into this but who wants to go back that far? Do you really think that there were good enough recording procedures then?

I agree with this, however, some things can be real. My mother, when she was young, saw proof that my family was descended from the real Robin Hood, the person that the legend comes from. Unfortunately after her Grandmother died the information became lost.

I am sure you can trust the Church Geneology Database.

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I think you can trust it completely, Mailis. I bet you really -are- descended from Odin and Freya, two mythical deities from Norse mythology.

I'm descended from a long line of leprechauns and unicorns.

Hmm I can see the Unicorn connection .. fallen a few inches lower and become smaller in years.. leprechaus... didnt they have bigger ears:p

Pam... There seems really to have been a family with those mythologycal names. It is possible it all is about some family, you know... :P

They also say that Odin was Abraham so Tor was one of his sons.... and the whole Snurres book of old tiemstories really is about Abrahams family... interesting...

I am far from beeing close to Renesanse yet as I do check all persons that I send before sending, that is why I have not been sending any lately... SHAME ON ME!

OGF is not really a Church site so I think there are many who write down wishes to their familylines.... I dont think there is a waterproof possibility to prove all those really are family with us... I know TWO persons we are family to.. and that is teh same for ALL of us... HEY we are FAMILY! by Adam and Eve :D

It was just so ovedwhelming to go all teh way to Adam and Eve and SOOO very many in my familytree... OK LETS BE COMPLETELY HONEST... MY HUSBANDS FAMILYTREE!!

Mine I have not yet got out of Finland with, but then I will go direct to Efraim anyway... right!:P Finnish beeing one of the lost tribes of course:rolleyes:

I try to be good and do some WORK with teh genealogy now. I should take a trip to Temple again in November and I really should have some own names with me.

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Do you mean trust other genealogies as in merging others' data from Ancestry or One World Tree for example into what you have done yourself?

This is NOT A GOOD IDEA. When one person has made an error, which everyone does, it magnifies and perpetuates it. Not that that hasn't always happened, even before online genealogical databases. I know in my own direct paternal line one optimistic assumption became the given word and not only has this been shown by more serious genealogists to be wrong, but DNA studies are now being done to try to sort it out.

I don't merge any Ancestry or One World Tree data at all without first checking it against what I already have and verifying with at least one hard record. I DO attach this data as source data and I can always go back later and look at it closely.

I've seen some trees that are so poorly done the errors just jump right out at you, like fathers born before sons and parents mixed up with children or siblings, but it isn't always that easy to spot.

JMHO, don't merge, but use those other trees as supporting material to your own research or as a jumping off place to look further for supporting hard records.

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I admit I am just getting into this but who wants to go back that far? Do you really think that there were good enough recording procedures then?

(Hi there, SF, I haven't been here in ages but I have thought of you)

Okay, back to the subject.

How far back you can go (speaking strictly of doing the genealogy not the work for the dead) depends a lot on the locality and family status. I have one of my paternal lines done reliably back to the year 825 CE. This is a Scandinavian line (patronymic) that has been particularly well documented and also has a familial heraldic surname making it somewhat easier.

Scandinavia in general, as well as lowland Europe (now the Netherlands and Belgium) seem to have kept very good records even during what was, for most of Europe, turbulent times. For me, these have been the easiest. In the Americas also the Dutch records are very good even compared to the early British settlers and the French excepting the French Walloons who arrived with the Dutch West Indies Co. to found New Amsterdam.

No one can reliably trace their ancestry to Adam and Eve and I cringe every time I hear anyone say this, although Grandma Zelda, my DIL's maternal grandmother who actually got me started doing serious genealogy says she has. This is the kind of thing, along with sloppy and overly inclusive LDS genealogical records (think IGI) that make LDS genealogy, and LDS genealogists somewhat of a laughing stock among truly serious genealogists.

Since I come from a family (actually families) with a significant number of serious, organized, genealogists who are not LDS, it is important to me to use reliable methods and records........play by their rules so to speak.

JMHO, since we now live in a society in which serious genealogy is the number one hobby in the US, not something elderly Sisters do on Sunday afternoons it is really important that we raise the bar of LDS genealogy to currently accepted standards and away from the haphazard mass gathering of names towards the singular goal of Temple work.

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Hi Mailis,

When I first started my family history my dear old Mum gave me lots of information about family members. I wrote it all down, pleased at how well I was doing. Then she died... :(

It was then that my troubles began. Armed with the information that Mum had given me I tried to track down the birth certificate for her mother, my Grandmother. It took me 6 years and a very large slice of luck to discover that I had been given the wrong name.

I can imagine the reception that Gran gave Mum when they met on the other side! Knowing my family it would be along the lines of "What did you tell him that for?" Slap! :eek:

So, how much do I trust? Hardly anything. I always double check everything I am given, if only to save myself another 6 years of fruitless searching...

Hope this helps in some way.

FF

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......... It took me 6 years and a very large slice of luck to discover that I had been given the wrong name..............

Too true that so much "first hand" family lore is so wrong.

I listened to my mother and father, now deceased, and my aunt, still living.

But, my Dutch ancestors turned out to be German, my British branch mainly Dutch, my French connection really German, but I have a French connection.......on the Dutch side.

My "adopted" grandfather wasn't adopted at all, but raised by his natural mother and a first generation son of Irish immigrants of whom both sides of the family disapproved and swept under the rug. This man not only raised my grandfather, but his two sisters and then one sister's son after she died very young.

My mother's "olde South" forebearers were carpetbaggers:o from NJ and PA, and her "French connection" was also really German.

JMO, and certainly in my case "family lore", or received wisdom is often romanticized. In my mother's "olde South" case this was certainly true......she spoke often of Confederate "roots", note carpetbagger reference above. She also spoke of French Heugenot ancestors, and a "Devereaux" uncle, a doctor in Denver. He was a German "Durboraw" optician descended from a PA carpetbagger:lol:

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  • 2 years later...

Oh, that's funny! I guess I have lucked out that my French connection really was French. I haven't verified the Native American claims on my paternal side yet, but they look likely to be so. The surnames and locale of that particular branch are Acadian, prior to the move to New Orleans, so being Metis is quite likely.

The Native American claims on my maternal side are looking less likely. I haven't gone too far on her side yet, but what data I have is suggesting a Sephardic crypto-Jew heritage, covered up with a story of Native American heritage to account for the physical appearance of my GGGrandmother.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'll be honest, I don't really trust historical birth records. Mostly because remains of humans have been found (humans in our full behavioral / appearance modernity-- NOT the ape-like ones) from around 50,000 years ago. But even just 10,000 years ago, we didn't really have a decent writing system, even in the form of pictures.

I do believe in god. I'm not an atheist. But I also know that science is finding things that simply don't match what our modified version of the bible says. This doesn't mean that the bible is not true. It just means there is a TON missing from it. If all the original biblical documents could be included, the bible would probably be the size of an encyclopedia, rather than one book! lol. So how can we just look at our one little extremely modified version (which by the way, has been re-written and re-translated so many times it isn't funny), and claim to know all of religious history, for sure?

Even the name of Jesus has changed. They say Jesus that came from the Greek name of "Iesous" which in turn came from the Hebrew names of "Jehoshua" or "Joshua". Some say the true name of the Lord is "YAHWEH-YASHA." But of course, there are plenty of other translations and opinions.

And that's just one word/name that cannot really be pinned down. The most famous name in the bible!! So clearly, less famous names are going to be extremely hard to track and confirm.

Then there is the fact that billions of people have been born, lived a full life (moved away to far off lands, got married, had children, and died), without ever having had anything about themselves or their life officially documented in any way. Some of those people are our blood ancestors. When we run into those road blocks, all we can do is guess.

As for how science ties into all this-- I've heard a lot of theories... For example, some experts have found that the words for certain numbers in the ancient languages often sounded or looked very much alike. And "hundreds" were sometimes confused with "thousands". And of course, early on, they didn't even have words or concepts for numbers as large as millions or billions. So naturally, even if our ancestors knew that the earth was more than 4.5 billion years old, even if God or an angel tried to tell them that in a vision--- there is no way they could have recorded a number like that, or conveyed it to us. They probably couldn't even comprehend it. We can barely wrap our minds around numbers that big today!

So yes, in matters of when the earth was created and exactly when our race began-- there may very well be some mistakes in calculation. Doesn't mean the bible is not true, it just means humans aren't perfect in record keeping.

As for the "part human, part ape" remains that are being found, and causing theories of evolution from apes... Well, there have been some cultures that were destroyed for perverting things, and mating with animals... I wouldn't put it past some of our ancestors... Its not like it hasn't been done before. Some scientists argue that it couldn't possibly be as simple as humans breeding with apes, because the ape half of these remains is unrelated to both prehistoric apes, and modern apes--- and the human half is unrelated to modern humans.

Ok well... If they're really so "unrelated" to us modern creatures and to each other, then where do they get the idea that we CAME from them? Its really quite laughable in my opinion. Besides, DNA that old is really messed up and largely incomplete. Deteriorated by time, and missing most of its components. And even if they really are unrelated to our modern "species"-- that doesn't mean they didn't cross breed amongst themselves way back then.

I DON'T believe we came from apes. I do believe in god, and Adam and Eve. But I also think our historical "time span" records, and our birth records are... A bit off, to say the least.

Edited by Melissa569
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