A friend of mine wants a family tree for her husband's upcoming significant birthday and a keen researcher friend of her's offered to put it together. She did a huge amount of work, and put together a comprehensive tree going back to the early 17th century on his paternal line. Very impressive stuff.
My friend is now arranging for the tree to be drawn up professionally in beautiful script and framed ready for presentation, but being a cautious type (and also being a bit proud of the extensive tree I think) she asked me to cast my eye over it before she sends it off to the calligrapher.
Sadly it is immediately apparent that her friend had a bit of trouble identifying a birth record for the subject's grandfather in the 1880s - but no problem because she found him in the 1891 census as the grandson of a couple (with the same surname as the boy) so she happily carried on up that family line for a further 6 generations..... doing diligent and well sourced research at every stage, spending a lot of time (and money) doing so, but all of it on the wrong family !
A bit more time spent at that stage would have revealed that the child was indeed a grandson, but of the grandmother only - the grandfather came into the picture much later and has no family connection to the child at all other than as a "step-grandad" - the grandson appears to have taken his surname to hide a couple of generations of illegitimate births.
The researcher friend is obviously very proud of her work, has published the (wrong) tree on Ancestry and is looking forward to seeing the finished tree being presented but doesn't yet know of my findings - that's going to be a difficult conversation to be had at some point !
The lesson to be learnt - never make assumptions from a single source without finding evidence to verify your theory and NEVER skip past a generation you are having a problem with and carry on researching based on an assumption or guess !
My friend is now arranging for the tree to be drawn up professionally in beautiful script and framed ready for presentation, but being a cautious type (and also being a bit proud of the extensive tree I think) she asked me to cast my eye over it before she sends it off to the calligrapher.
Sadly it is immediately apparent that her friend had a bit of trouble identifying a birth record for the subject's grandfather in the 1880s - but no problem because she found him in the 1891 census as the grandson of a couple (with the same surname as the boy) so she happily carried on up that family line for a further 6 generations..... doing diligent and well sourced research at every stage, spending a lot of time (and money) doing so, but all of it on the wrong family !
A bit more time spent at that stage would have revealed that the child was indeed a grandson, but of the grandmother only - the grandfather came into the picture much later and has no family connection to the child at all other than as a "step-grandad" - the grandson appears to have taken his surname to hide a couple of generations of illegitimate births.
The researcher friend is obviously very proud of her work, has published the (wrong) tree on Ancestry and is looking forward to seeing the finished tree being presented but doesn't yet know of my findings - that's going to be a difficult conversation to be had at some point !
The lesson to be learnt - never make assumptions from a single source without finding evidence to verify your theory and NEVER skip past a generation you are having a problem with and carry on researching based on an assumption or guess !
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