A little common sense with the images, please

My own pet annoyance are the images of humans who lived 400 years after the profile, or conversely, lived at the same time but were a different person altogether. Elizabeth Woodville is a big favorite. If you believed our tree, dozens and dozens of women looked exactly like her.

Maps. Maps are good. Also images of the House, even if it is now in ruins.

All those heraldic images that aren’t attached rightfully; that’s another.

But you are right. The Union Jack is all over the English Middle Ages. No. Just no.

Also the Irish flag with the tree bars of color? Not medieval. At all.

"Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks he needs more of it than he already has." Rene Descartes

Well chosen images can bring profiles to life! I'm sure most folk aren't intending to mislead others when they use them inappropriately - please don't come down too hard when the main intent is to make their family history interesting to others.

I go to Google Books and look for out of copyright images of the town they lived in. Or Google Images and find images of an old map or a city sign with an early date on it (for Colonial Americans).

i generally dislike any use of a flag. It is too generic. I look for something that will single the person or the family out and distinguish them from some other person / family.

I agree Private User that people are to be given credit for at least trying to use an image.

One thing that images can do is help prevent bad merges. It's the same reason we sometimes add locations to the Display Name, e.g., "So and So, of Hartford".

That's why flags are too generic for me, even if they are the actual flag from the era.

It is so true that images make family history come to life. Also, we have a gallery! If you get bored, change the front image!

Here are "suggested best practices" I'll summarize my own priority

https://wiki.geni.com/index.php/Profile_Images,_Guidelines

1. Something you are - Identity (photo, portrait, signature, effigy, tombstone, accurate coat of arms)
2. Something you have - (home, property, possessions ...)
3. Someplace you've been - (church [particularly if baptized or married or preached there), maps, road side historical markers ...)
4. Something you did - (occupation, honor received, military service, immigration sailing ship ...)

Flags can be great if specific to time & place. I think I have a collection of Civil War battalion flags, for instance.

Oh and I use town & county markers for first settlers of an area. Since there are probably 50 John Smith's arriving from England to America in the 1600s, an English flag is actually likely to cause a mis merge. There are some clever graphics out there of say sailing ships with an English flag. That gets the "colonial from England" message across better, in my opinion.

I constructed a "who's your daddy?" graphic for Elizabeth Plummer (Stockett), to illustrate the point that we're not quite sure who her biological father was (and neither was anyone else in her own time, for that matter). The order of events seems to be, in quick succession: 1) Thomas Stockett died, 2) his widow Mary Wells married George Yate, 3) Elizabeth was born. That would make her legally the daughter of George Yate, he did indeed regard her as his daughter, and documents exist referring to her as "Elizabeth Yate". But other documents refer to her as "Elizabeth Stockett". It's entirely possible that she was biologically Stockett's daughter, while still legally Yate's. Elizabeth Plummer

Elizabeth Plummer is your fifth cousin 9 times removed.
You
→ Marjorie Ann McLean
your mother → James Forrest McLean
her father → Jared Sylvester McLean
his father → Nancy Ann McLean
his mother → Catherine Armstrong (Bartlett)
her mother → John William BARTLETT
her father → William J. Bartlett
his father → John??? Garner Bartlett
his father → WILLIAM BARTLETT
his father → WILLIAM BERKLEY
his father → Margaret Bartlett
his mother → Margaret Brent
her mother → Anne Peshall
her mother → Ralph Sheldon, MP
her father → Katherine Plowden
his sister → Mary White
her daughter → Richard Whyte, IV
her son → Frances Wells
his daughter → Mary Yeats
her daughter → Elizabeth Plummer
her daughter

She's my 7th great aunt, per current construction of the Geni tree. It used to be thought that she married Thomas Plummer I, which would make her a direct ancestress, but once the contretemps about her parentage was analyzed, it was clear that she had to have married Thomas Plummer II and that it was the elusive Elizabeth Smith who had married Thomas Plummer I.

You'll still find lots of family trees and accounts that have the two Elizabeths in the wrong order.

https://www.google.com/search?q=contretemps&oq=contretemps&...
https://www.google.com/search?q=ancestress&oq=ancestress&aq...

I love your use of words Private User.