BEDENKELIJKE VOOROUDERS... Help me de connectie naar fictieve stambomen te verbreken (mythen, legenden, sprookjes...)

WRT non-paternity events: I like to quote sources that link to sources....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-paternity_event#Rates_of_non-pate...

It's certainly more than 1%, but only in one case cited (a study done in Mexico on 396 children) was there anywhere near a 10% rate found.

@Sharon Doubell There are lineages which are 100% correct because of the dna, character, fysical appaerence (nowadays we have photos and earlier paintings) and the fact that both parents say they are the parents. This chain is reliable. But not when secretly there is a different father. This happends, that is true. But lineages generally speaking are right. However a specific connection can be false. The churches sources are reliable as a source because they are not made to thrick us nowadays.

There is a periode in history when there are only family genealogies which are sometimes confirmed by independent official sources and sometimes not. But the can be true, but you dont know for sure. And there are myths, but they might have a base in reality. When you listen to your feelings you can decribe it as a gradually moving into the foggy mist of historical times.

But should we throw the whole genealogy away as myth or not scientific, or seriously, because a minority want to stick with their myths. I dont think so. Nobody can ever give complete certainty about anything, but the myths must be pointed out as myths.

Because when we give these myths the power to keep themselves alive, why not stand powerfull in our own days for the rational side of our brain and make a separation.

I think that if one decide to cut somewhere in a lineage, there must be given a short accountability why this one is reliable (with source) and why the other is not. But this is a hell of job. But must be done.

:-) Wrt to non-paternity events, the percentage in localized contemporary tests, while extremely interesting, I agree - was not salient to the point I was making. This was that birth certificates - a fundamental basis of the validity of our tree - constitute historical NOT scientific evidence.

@Harald Tveit Alvestrand hi
It is all very interesting, and this knowledge is scientific in itself, but we can not use it in our genealogical research. It only gives stress that our hobby is useless. If you want certainty do a DNA test and for the rest rely on independent reliable sources who were made for something else than genealogy, namely for administration.
Another interesting perspective is that what is believed to be true is true. These old myths are true for the one who believe them. they had a social function. In our days our concept is rational based, so we think that that is better.
And if the son of the king is biologically in fact not the son and this was in history never known, why bother. If you do that you can throw the whole genealogy away as a serious business. And we dont do that.

Diederik Mooij, your point deserves a longer answer than I am able to give right now. But on the question of DNA as proving paternity on the historical tree - I don't know a lot about it, but I think - and am open to correction - that there is a very finite number of generations that this can be true for. (And especially in strongly connected cousin communities that are the result of a 'bottleneck' of DNA, like many of us come from.

@Sharon Doubell they are widely used on our planet as reliable. So are you to question that? If a son nowadays thinks he is illegitimate, because he doesnt look like his father, everybody sees it and he can take test. In the past people also could see this and it could have had consequences not found in the archives nowadays. That is true, but we geneaologists live with this. But because of this we should not keep more even more irrelable lineages in the serious tree.

Sharon Doubell last post. I guess even DNA can not give the certainty for the long lineages. But for parenthood it can. even then there is a certain amount of certainty.

Diederik Mooij, I think you misunderstand me. I'm not questioning the reliability of doing genealogy using DNA testing for a couple of generations back.
(And, as you say, the statistical probabilities for false positives are so small as to function as a certainty for establishing direct paternity maternity, in my opinion).

But, I seem to recall, (and I wish I could remember where I read this :-( ) that by 8 generations back you are no more likely to share any more DNA with that person than you do with a stranger. If you go sideways: By your 4th cousins you have a good chance of sharing NO DNA with them.

I'm not questioning the Science - I LOVE the idea of DNA trees - I'm pointing out that in the foreseeable future, there is no way to build DNA trees as genealogy. DNA can only be used to enhance historical record keeping, right now.

Sharon Doubell Concerning DNA from one person many generations back, i agree with you that there is not much certainty of ancestry anymore.. But there is this typical father to child and mother to child dna part (forgot the name) which is given forth for many generations. Combined with other evidence you might prove that with a person is your ancestor or you share a male or female ancestor.

And "widely used on our planet as reliable" (1.41) i ment the Birth certificate :-) not DNA.

But that is all a bit of topic... :-D

:-) It's late Friday afternoon here, and I'm due to meet people for Sundowners in half an hour - but I'm battling to drag myself away :-)

The birth certificate IS reliable Historical data about contractual family relationships. There is good reason in family law (at least in SA) that a child born into a marriage is always legally considered the legitimate offspring of the parents who contracted that marriage.

Genealogy tracks the History of those family narratives (and, as you point out, this tracking has an important social function too). From beyond antiquity, at the stage where the story of those families becomes so old that it is called myth, none of us (except the very gullible?) assume it can be objectively verified, But to cease to document those family stories for which we continue to have written sources, is to betray the function of History.

It is important (and useful and interesting) to flag the fact that History is sliding into Myth on profiles (and important and interesting to debate the most valid amongst the sources we have to even document the historical trace of a person’s potential existence); but, it is also important to acknowledge that – in scientifically validifiable terms – most of our tree beyond 3 or 4 generations (and I’m being conservative here) falls into the realm of potential myth (objectively unverifiable – especially if we’re tracing paternity - story telling).

Genealogists need to start understanding the difference between History and Science as bodies of valid Knowledge; and also the difference between the social function each of them fulfil. Biology is a fascinating discipline; but so is History. No academic thinks one on its own is enough!

Toasting all of my Dutch cuzzins with a good South African red wine. “Proost” :-)

Sharon Doubell
Alinea 3, those mythical or oral lineages can never be verified and need to be seperated from the rest of the tree, although the rest of the official tree is also not certain. See what i wrote before and here below and what you mention your self.
Alinea 4. If you talk about these secret illegitimate children, i dont agree, that you just can transfer this % of illegitimacy onto the generations. So if 5% is illegal, then every 20 generations there is doubt. I think it is a logical mistake or at least to general. Times are different and families are different.

Idea:
As an extra tool one could us a percentage of certainty with each generation. Fater and Mother, you know them, dna test = 100%, grandparents, well grandfathers face on the photos, hobbies talents , the fact that he was the official father of your father, i dont know ... 99% people born in the period with Civil records higer certainty than people born in period of only church records unless also based on notary or other legal documents etc.
But altogether there is a kind of certainty, which is completely different from mythical lineages, which are funny rubbish :-O and they can exist on GENI but cut from the rest of the tree which is at least based on something legal. A link in the text can satisfy the people who want to mention it anyways.
Good weeekend

Ik ben de aanvallen op Fred behoorlijk zat. Moeten de curatoren elke gelegenheid te baat nemen dit te doen? Jammer want ik had echt een hele hoge pet van de curatoren en nam mn petje af voor al het werk wat ze verrichten. Ben ik natuurlijk niet helemaal kwijt geraakt. Maar ik verdraag het niet meer deze aanvallen op een voor ons zo goede, gewaardeerde, ex curator. Het kan me niet schelen wie waar gelijk in heeft. Vervuil onze discussies hier niet mee. Vertaal dit zelf maar naar het engels, ik doe het niet.

I agree with the philosophy that we on Geni should represent the sources. At its core, genealogy is nothing more than chaining together sources to document lines of descent. But, we have to accept that (without DNA testing) all the chain can ever show us are the legal and social relationships. We'll never know the biological facts.

One of the problems we face as genealogists is that, as we move back through history, the nature of the sources changes. In recent generations we work with birth, marriage, and death records. In the very distant past we work with the genealogical compilations our ancestors made for themselves.

But our ancestors didn't follow the same genealogical principles we do. They used oral traditions and older compilations, and they didn't document their sources.

Some people think it should be simple to find and cut the questionable links. It's not simple at all. In most cases, the things we might say are facts blend more or less smoothly with things we might say are legend. If we look for a place to cut the line, the choice will be arbitrary, just someone's opinion. I don't see how anyone could think that's good genealogical method.

For example, someone earlier argued (or came close to arguing) that we should cut Rollo's parents because we don't want a line to Odin. I'm sympathetic to cutting Rollo's parents. There are good arguments on both sides, but we shouldn't cut the line just because we don't like the distant ancestry we would get from that source.

George Homs argued earlier that the Geni tree projects a single creationist vision of the world. Maybe it does, but it's not a unified vision. We have Adam and Eve, but also Odin, Zeus, Vishnu, Huáng Dí, Amaterasu, and probably others.

I'm not surprised. Every human culture is always connected to its cultural heroes, and throughout Europe, India, and China ancient kings are always descended from their people's gods. And, all those ancient lines present the same genealogical problem -- how do you cut your link to your culture's past when there is no logical basis to cut at any particular point?

Nou Jennie, je haalt me de woorden uit de mond. En, om in genealogietermen te blijven, haal ik een nederlandse uitspraak aan:
"aartje naar z'n vaartje" ? Je kunt je afvragen waarom deze meneer curator is geworden....

@Michaël van Groeningen Private Ik heb die boodschap gerapporteerd met als reden dat bedreigen niet kan en dat ik "offended" ben. Dat kunnen jullie ook doen, dan wordt de boodschap mogelijk verwijderd.

Diederik, rapporteren kan maar één keer in het geni systeem, maar fijn dat jij het al gedaan hebt.

Ik wil ook een klacht indienen. Ik ben het zo zat, zo verschrikkelijk zat. En idd ik kon het niet rapporteren was al gedaan. Ik ga nu uitvogelen hoe ik dat doen moet. Ik hoef geen tip te krijgen hoe dat te doen, I am a big girl. :-)

Ik ben wel verwonderd over het plotse verbale geweld, inclusief de insinuatie dat de Nederlandstalige gebruikers intellectueel inferieur zouden zijn. Ik stel voor dat we in typische "lage-landen-stijl" een open en eerlijke gesprek blijven voeren, tolerant naar iedereen toe. Me dunkt nog altijd dat, indien we nonsens-connecties zien, dat we daaraan wat moeten doen - ten behoeve van de geloofwaardigheid van onze genealogische speurtocht en van de kwaliteit van Geni. Zoals eerder vermeld, met name door Diederik, laat ons dan nuchter de motivatie geven op profielen.
Curator-profielen lijken mij geen heilige koeien. De selectie van curatoren gebeurt op oppervlakkige basis door andere curatoren - en dat vormt geen bewijs voor kwaliteit.
Bijvoorbeeld, vandaag werd mij door een andere curator verweten dat ik moeilijk over iets kon oordelen omdat ik geen academische achtergrond zou hebben. Toevallig heb ik wél een Masters Degree in Politieke Wetenschappen, cum laude. Dat maakt van mij geen genealoog noch politoloog noch historicus. Maar mij het recht ontzeggen te mogen oordelen, niet in het minst wanneer ik de academische wereld bijspring wanneer het gaat om het onderscheid tussen historie en mythen - dat gaat wel erg ver!!!
In feite wordt het hoge woord gevoerd door mensen die dwars ingaan TEGEN wat wetenschappers over de hele wereld aan collectieve kennis hebben vergaard. Heel verwonderlijk.
Maar goed, intellectuele tegenspraak moet er zijn, en is GOED voor alle toekomstige kennis. Dreigementen die de discussie beknotten is een trieste rem op intellectuele vrijheid - de donkere tijden waardig.
Het moedigt mij alleen maar aan om nog harder te werken op de releventie van ons werk op Geni.

Justin Durand
Second alinea. There are sources in between. Family notes out of family archives which are reliable because the existance of the people mentioned is confirmed in other administrative sources although all the links are not confirmed completetly. It is also complicated, because the primairy sources can be burned. And what's left as notes in a family archive can seem reliable when it is not or seem unreliable when it is true.

Fourth alinea. We must try to find a way to get more certainty when a lineage is really not probable and when it is.

Keys can be:
1. When it is confirmed in more then one seperated source.
For every ancestor find in other then civil records and the other reliable sources (not made to fool people then or us nowadays), the oldest source should be mentioned in the text. If this is a secondary source and the only one left, you can make the choice, we fool ourselves and pretend that it is the truth and put it on GENI or we think scientifically and not romantic that there is no certainty so we should not put it here or when placed remove the link to it.
2. Another way is that we follow the logical deduction, historical experience, knowledge and intuition of a professional. And we here on GENI just follow this experts opinion published in reliable magazines or websites. Which are recognized by its quality by many other experts who really took a good look at it.

So i think there is a logical basis to cut, that is that the first link looked at it from the present to the past which is very uncertain must be the end, the border, the limit. And the rest should not be linked with it. We nowadays just have to make the choice. But i agree (if you ment this) that it is a bit boring to follow only science.

I find your last sentence of your text also a little bit romantic in a positive way. But the link to our past is there anyway, not because we keep a unscientific lineage on GENI.

Ik heb niets tegen intellectuele of anderszins tegenspraak (hoeft echt niet alleen maar intellectueel te zijn hoor) maar ik heb alles tegen onverdraagzaamheid, mensen aanvallen om welke reden dan ook en vooral aan het bederven van mijn plezier hier op Geni. Ik hield van deze discussie en nu is het voor mij weg gehaald. Ik vind het knap van je George, en bijzonder, dat je dit zo constructief benadert, compliment aan jou hiervoor! Het verschil is, hoe interessant een discussie ook is, zodra er persoonlijke aanvallen ontstaan raakt dat mij diep. Het kwetst mij, al is het niet op mij gericht, dat doet er niet toe.

Private Dat had ik blijkbaar ook. En meer mensen. Maar Jen, de rest van de discussie is wel leuk. Het glas is 99% vol, dus negeer gewoon dat nare commentaar van die man verder. Fred kan het aan, zoals je kan lezen, dus laat je pret niet bederven.

Shmuel-Aharon Kam (Kahn) / (שמואל אהרן קם (קאן doelt misschien ook op dit project http://www.geni.com/projects/Biblical-Tree/38 daar vallen ook woorden als "getting suspended...." etc

Wij hebben een sterke, goed met elkaar overweg kunnende, positieve Nederlanse talige gemeenschap. Dat is feit waar vele andere taalgebieden jaloers op kunnen zijn.

Diederik, my point was that it is not as simple as it sounds like it would be. Older sources tend to intertwine in a way that makes it hard to make valid judgments. Scholars themselves often disagree, but somehow genealogists are confident they can find the answer. And, of course they can ... if they are willing to throw out the evidence and just make an arbitrary decision.

In many cases, there is a relatively easy answer. Rollo is a good example. The earliest source says he was a Dane. Later sources say he was a Norwegian. The easy answer (in one way) would be to say that scholars disagree. Cut his parents and put the whole thing in a discussion.

But on Geni that's much harder. People add new duplicates every day. Every time someone adds a new duplicate for Rollo and every time someone merges the duplicate the bad parents will be back. Someone on Geni has to go fix the profile. In the best world, the bad parents will get merged with their duplicates and Rollo will be disconnected. It's asking a lot to think that anyone wants to make a career out of keeping Rollo from being linked to parents that the sources give.

In other cases, the answer is not so easy. If you accept the Orkneyinga saga when it says Rollo was the son of Ragnvald, do you also accept it for the father of Ragnvald? For the grandfather of Ragnvald? If there is only one source and it goes back to Fornjót, how do you decide how much to use? And, if there are three sources and they all agree, how do you eliminate them? And if they are all different, how do you decide that one is more trustworthy than the others but still decide to cut somewhere?

The same thing happens with all of the ancient lines. Rollo is one of the easy ones.

If you look at Cerdic, the ancestor of the English kings, you see a different part of the same problem. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says he was a descendant of Odin, but scholars agree that he has been grafted on to an older genealogy. So, on Geni we could cut his parents too (and appoint someone to spend time making sure he doesn't get re-attached), but we would be doing that by going against the only source we have based on an academic theory. I wouldn't mind doing that, but what would we do where scholars disagree? If some scholars said Cerdic was grafted on and other scholars disagree, would we just choose one theory and vote on it?

Even with more reasonable history there is disagreement. If you look at the literature for Charlemagne's ancestors, some scholars think he has only 8 proven ancestors. Some say 10. Some says 12. Etc. Everyone can agree he probably wasn't a descendant of Zeus, but very few people can agree about how much of his ancestry is real and how much is doubtful.

I agree with the idea of looking for places we can cut bad information, but I feel strongly that if there is any doubt or disagreement it should involve a detailed discussion focused on the actual sources, not on a rush to get rid of things we don't like.

Justin Durand Interesting.
I can agree that we can keep also the doubtful because of the arguments you give and dislink only the really crazy ones, on which a majority of scholars agree that they are made up. But then maybe we shift a little bit towards (romantic) feelings of peoples, Danish, Jews or descendants of Charlemagne, etc..

General question for such a discussion can be, why copy only a part of a mythical ancestorslist and not the whole lineage then? In other words, what can be the content of such a discussion if there is just a namelist oraly come to us without any other sources?

The general idea which George started is good too. Cuts must be made, we all agree on that and it must be done with both good arguments and carefully taking into account the feelings of the people.

I think there are quite a lot of completely mythical ancestors lists. For example "Gaia" exists as (unfortunately, and in my daily experience, prematurely, deceased). But Cerdic may have existed, whereas Hengist and Horsa in Kent seem obviously mythical (why should Anglo-Saxon Kings have claimed descent from a name so obviously Celtic, unless there semed to them to be a relationship with a genuine historical figure which was worth claiming).

It gets very murky around here, as one should expect, and barring a miracle it is not going to get less so. We've had (at least) 200 years of scholarship on some of these people. Is anyone going to find a new source, which clears them up a bit? I think not.

Mark

I don’t think anyone was impugning the intellect of the Dutch users (if I’m understanding your comment in Dutch above correctly, George?) , and George is amongst the very brightest Curators we have; but, to be fair, you are talking between yourselves about cutting links on the tree to ancestors that are everyone else’s too. And you did suggest that you should be allowed to do this because genealogy is an exact Science. That people assert dissenting views is hardly surprising, and the act of engaging in debate should not be seen as an insult to intellect. (Exactly the opposite, in fact).

You’ve attracted a ‘posse’ :-) of Curators responding because the job we’re tasked with as Curators is protecting the profiles on the tree. If there is a conversation about cutting whole branches off the tree, we are supposed to be interested in the reasons. In Shmuel’s case ‘cleaning’ up the Jewish tree could amount to removing all of the years of work he has devoted to Geni.

George, you say -“Our ancestors have paid a hard price for getting rid of political oppression through religion.” But Shmuel’s ancestors paid a hard price to keep their religious traditions. Intolerance is the evil here, not religion; and this discussion is about cutting out Jewish ancestry from our tree, as ‘myth’. You can hardly be surprised that Shmuel is angry at the idea. The written record of the biblical patriarchs must be amongst the oldest genealogical records in the world. If it also records their sense of connection to their G-d, that is important historical data too.

Evolution is not being ‘written off’ in a tree that includes gods. We South Africans even proudly have a profile for 'Mrs Ples' Australopithecus Africanus :-) (And do you remember what a furore that caused :-) ) But there are 2 million years of unrecorded ancestors’ profiles between her and us (and our gods), so I feel confident in predicting that it is not possible to show the science of evolution using the historical method of Genealogy.

Sharon Doubell I do think it is an intresting discussion, because it forces us to stay cool although one might get stressed. I am not part of any posse. As i wrote yesterday, and i thought i said it all, was:

"The general idea which George started is good too. Cuts must be made, we all agree on that and it must be done with both good arguments and carefully taking into account the feelings of the people".

If George's cutting idea is too sensitive for you, how can we point out when a line is compleet nonsens or can never ever be proven right? Can you tell me that? Shouldnt there be at last be some remarkes in the text?

And i am sorry to say but religion is the way our ancestors coped with the world, in a world where there was no science to help them explaining the world. Still a lot of people stick with that, but shouldnt we go on and leave myths or a lot of aspects of religion where they belong that is in the churches, temples and mosques and not on this way on the supertech internet, invented by human beings and not by a god and to help to share knowledge to have progress in science and knowledge?

I haven't seen anyone suggesting to cut off jewish ancestry - nor any other ancestry, for that matter. I seriously hope that Google Trandlate is not used here to ascert what someone has written in Dutch.
I guess we're all here to map ancestry - not to map links to unproven ancestors. Especially those of which the sheer existance is up in the air. We're not talking about god. We're largely talking about the medieval fabrications that, incidentally, indeed very often lead to purely mythical land.
Talking about curator tasks. I would think a task is exactly to protect fact from utter fiction. It shoulf not be to protect fiction ftom fact. Unfortunately, as it happens, there seem to be a lot of inappropriate, so-called "curated" profiles that perpetuate fiction.
Generalizations are certainly hurting a proper debate. Things have to be thought about case by case.
This has NOTHING to do with damaging solid scholarly work such as the biblical tree, sagas, etc... I don't even understand why this is concluded from the Dutch discussion.
Yes, I do think we need decisive action in weeding out the messy or false connections. I wiuld estimate the majority of that to be in the 700AD-1100AD timeframe. And, yes, I'm inclined to follow generally accepted academic principles for that, rather than my personal inclinations or those of others on Geni if these are undocumented in the eye of general scrutiny.
Again, that is totally unrelated to respect for the integrity of the traditions of belief systems.
I don't want to build some "General Theory" on that, but rather act on the basis of fact, academic consensus and informed opinion in the interest of a credible family tree.

George J. Homs it seems that we're not so far away from each other. It seems also that we'll get much more benefit out of spending time discussing specific instances than to discuss generalities.

I think we've battered poor Rollo into oblivion - in that case, we've got two scholarlly opinions that are in conflict, and no doubt at all (as far as ANYTHING medeival can be known) that the guy existed. So he's not a good example of what George is protesting, even if the mention of his name was what brought me (back) into this discussion.

I've cut my share of links (among others those that link Odin to specific kings in Turkey - there are legends even I don't want to represent here). I'm quite open to cutting more of them.

Suggestion: Let's end this thread, and let the next person who wants to cut something find a *specific* link to jump on, start a discussion on that specific profile, and let's have a discussion about that specific link. Either it will get sourced or it will get cut.

Deal?