I've just been researching a cousin's maternal line in Scotland. Comparing what I've found out, by approaching the family logically, to what I've seen on several Ancestry trees provides an Awful Warning of the risks of jumping to conclusions.
In this instance the main ancestor married three times. The first and third wives were named Margaret and the second wife Agnes was only around for the 1851 and 1861 censuses. So anyone taking the easy route would assume that Margaret was the mother of all 12 children born up to 1879! The first warning sign was that she was supposedly only 12 when her first son was born. And when I got back to 1861 Margaret had become Agnes.
In the end I found all three marriages, despite a couple of indexing errors on ScotlandsPeople, and located everyone in just about all the censuses. But my tree bears only a passing resemblance to the several different interpretations among the Ancestry trees.
In this instance the main ancestor married three times. The first and third wives were named Margaret and the second wife Agnes was only around for the 1851 and 1861 censuses. So anyone taking the easy route would assume that Margaret was the mother of all 12 children born up to 1879! The first warning sign was that she was supposedly only 12 when her first son was born. And when I got back to 1861 Margaret had become Agnes.
In the end I found all three marriages, despite a couple of indexing errors on ScotlandsPeople, and located everyone in just about all the censuses. But my tree bears only a passing resemblance to the several different interpretations among the Ancestry trees.
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