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Come and collaborate and share your knowledge of spurious pedigrees. Add links; add profiles; identify wishful thinking, leaps of fancy, mistakes since corrected but still in circulation ... and outright scams.
There are many reasons that people create fraudulent genealogies:
1. Family members that are trying to hide something or trying to impress someone by making the family history a little more impressive. These stories are then innocently passed down by future generations of family members.
2. Amateur genealogists who have limited genealogical or historical skills and accept others work without any additional research. Sometimes an amateur is anxious to connect to someone "important" and forces a connection that really is not there.
3. Professional genealogists who are not thorough enough with their research or are not up-to-date "genealogically".
4. A professional crook who's trying to perpetrate a scam. One of the best known in the genealogical world is Gustave Anjou. He lived from 1863-1942 and contaminated as many as 2000 lines. Some of the others that have been identified are Charles H. Browning, Orra E. Monnette, C.A. Hoppin, Frederick A. Virkus, Horatio Gates Somerby and there are others.
How can you protect ourselves against fraud? First you need to make sure that you do not add to the problem. Your research should be thorough and well sourced. Use others' work as a guide, but check the information in the original sources whenever you are able and find out as much as possible about the author/submitter and his/her genealogical background and research methods...
Common bogus pedigrees that keep appearing in Geni
This is not a complete list by any means of bogus pedigrees that keep showing up in Geni, but it is a start and the hope is that people will add to it as they discover such pedigrees.
Let me preface this list by pointing out that many of the recurrent offenders seem to have been propagated by errors that crept into web trees a while back that keep getting recopied into Geni. So all it takes is an uncritical copy of a web tree to make them happen all over again.
1. John Wells, of Ringstead, Northampton, seems to wind up married to "Lady" Jennet Lawtie, of East Riding of Yorkshire. This is incorrect. According to the Parish Register of Howden, Jennet Lawtie was born and died in the Howden Parish. She indeed married a John Wells, but it was a local John Wells, of Cotnes, not the noble John Wells of Ringstead.
2. The ancestry of would-be German immigrant Johannes Jacob Peter Batdorf is full of bogus names, like "Miles Terry Batdorf" and "Eric Gordon Batdorf". It appears that somebody somewhere filled in a tree that was missing given names with names of their own invention, and this was propagated. This also seemingly affected families who married into the Batdorfs, like the Anspach family. In some cases it is more challenging to tell that a name has been invented; Geni still contains a few names that could go either way, like "Tabitha Anna".
3. All Taylors are not related to President Zachary Taylor. There were at least half-a-dozen different Taylor families that emigrated to Virginia, and a number also that emigrated elsewhere in the New World. These English families tended to use similar names for their children, and many records were lost, so be especially cautious merging similar-appearing Taylors in Virginia.
Links
- Fraudulent Genealogies
- Ancestry Believe It or Not: Genealogy Scams, Fakes & Forgers
- Probably the granddaddy of genealogical fraud was Gustave Anjou....
- We Wuz Robbed! compiled by Mr. Robert Charles Anderson, CG, FASG
- 5 Bad Genealogy Sources Link is unavailable.
- “The Back-Bach Genealogical Society: It was all just a scam”
- An heraldic primer
- Grafting Family Trees by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG
- "The English Ancestral Homes of the founders of Cambridge" by J. Gardner Bartlett
- Dont Believe Everything You Read
- We're Related To... Someone Famous
- Why Your Great-Grandmother Wasn't A Cherokee Princess
- #62 Royal Descents, Notable Kin, and Printed Sources: On Adding Internet Data to Your Ancestral Charts by Gary Boyd Roberts
- Paul Gifford's IDENTIFYING WILLIAM GIFFORD'S ORIGINS: fRAUDULENT, FICTITIOUS AND FAILED ATTEMPTS
- Genealogy traps : common errors in genealogical databases
- Popular Errors in Colonial and Medieval Lineages
- Fraudulent Genealogies
- Beware of Fraudulent Genealogies
- Fakes, Frauds and Forgeries
- Watch Out for Fake Family Trees
- "The Strange Case of Jesse Montgomery Seaver, Rogue Genealogist", The CONNector, Connecticut State Library newsletter, Vol. 19, #2, May 2017.
- Category: Fictitious and Legendary Genealogy
- Category: Horatio Gates Somerby Fraud
- Category: Shawnee Heritage Fraud
- “What's wrong with Jim White's Buckner Books”
- “Davy Crockett's fake French ancestors”
- Common errors:
- Henry Adams (1583 to 1641), immigrated from co. Somerset, England to Braintree, Massachusetts. His great-grandfather was a lowly tenant farmer (with no coat of arms), but in 1853 a forged document fooled the editors of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, and the bogus lineage was published in 1893 in Charles Henry Browning's unreliable Americans of Royal Descent.
- Samuel Bacon immigrated from Rutland, England to Barnstablem Massachusetts, before 1659, and from there to New Jersey.
- John Crandall was not the son of John Crandall and Elizabeth Drake (with a lineage going back through the Prideaux family to Magna Carta baron William Malet). This has been proven false.
- Mary Wentworth (b. 1569), claimed to be the wife of Mayflower pilgrim William Brewster. This isn't impossible; there just isn't any evidence to support such a supposition.
- Robert White (1558-1617) of Shalford, co. Essex. His children immigrated to America, settling in Massachusetts and Connecticut. His false medieval ancestry is widespread on the internet: He has been confused with another Robert White from the other side of England, father of
- John White of Wenham and Lancaster, Massachusetts. John White of Wenham and Lancaster, Massachusetts, whose supposed medieval ancestry is also the result of mistaken identity. His great-grandfather
- Richard White, son of Thomas White and Agnes Richards of Meriot and Martok, Somerset, has often been confused with his more prominent contemporary (probably no relation)
- Richard White, son of Sir Thomas White and Agnes WHITE of South Warnborough, Hampshire.
Known Fraudulent Genealogists
Retrieved from FamilySearch