Bjornsson, Walpole, Gruffydd, Severucci and others -- giant fake tree, partly infecting Geni

Started by Anne Brannen on Thursday, March 22, 2018
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3/22/2018 at 7:56 AM

Fake Tree Alert!

In the process of cleaning up the medieval tree, I came across profiles that made no sense, and when I tracked them down, I found only web trees. And looking further, I found what may be the progenitor of all the web trees that have this family in them.

If you click here, you can see what tipped me off: https://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=DESC&db=:29...

1) there was no Humphrey Walpole, 1st Baron of Walpole, in 1301. The Barons of Walpole didn't exist until the 18th century.
2) The pattern of Walpoles marrying Bjornssons, generation after generation, makes no sense.
3) Bjornsson should not be used as a surname at this point -- WAY too early. Real names would be patronymics.
4) although a bunch of these people are supposed kings, none exist. Except in web trees.

This is just a snippet of the medieval portion of the tree -- it goes down into present day.

I'm pretty solid on the fakery of the medieval portion -- I also question the later tree, also, though; for instance, here is Michael Borden, the 29th Earl of Carlisle: https://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=:290... Nice! But the 13th Earl of Carlisle, George Howard, died in 1994.

This tree is vast.

And unlike the top of the Wheeler tree, which could just be cut off, and was made up of nonsense names, these names certainly caught my eye, but aren't (except for the entire Bjornsson tree) egregious, in general. There's a medieval Victoria Walpole, and that's not possible, but mostly the fake names are pretty good.

But I think it would be a good idea to look for these people in the Geni tree.

Here are a few profiles in the Geni World Tree that come from this compromised "source" -- they are all connected to other compromised profiles. None that I could find are from any piece of the Geni tree later than Early Modern; most are medieval:

Catherine Bjornsson, {Fictional}
ELIZABETH WALPOLE, {Fictional}
Llewelyn Gruffydd, {Fictional}
Andrea Maria Severucci, {Fictional}
GEORGIANA BORNHOLM, {Fictional}

This particular tree was uploaded in 2004, and it's possible that y'all already knew about it, but I looked, and I saw no discussions, and didn't find it in the Spurious Pedigree project.

My plan at the moment, unless there are objections (or! somebody finds actual records of these people! not holding my breath), is to label the profiles I can find in the medieval tree that are from this fake tree, put in information, and get them into the Spurious Pedigree project.

3/22/2018 at 8:01 AM

The reason, by the way, that I'm in favor of keeping the fake profiles connected and labelling them is that otherwise they keep being invented anew.

3/22/2018 at 8:34 AM

Woops, no, sorry, here is a profile in the Geni Tree from the 18th century:

John Morgan, {Fictional}

Jukka PRO
4/21/2018 at 12:21 PM

Thank you, Anne. Good to weed out this kind of errors.

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