Burke and Massue
23 Sept 2026 - page started. After the Heritage Day tours earlier this month it was becoming clearer that some of the geneological information was a little questionable
In my opinion the two most culpable historian/genealogists are Sir Bernard Burke and Melville Henry Massue. Their two seminal works are quoted by modern-day historian/genealogists thus perpetuating any errors and interpretations that they may have made. In the days of Ancestry.com and the advances in AI this is likely to get a lot worse. The creation of the GEDCOM database by the architects of Ancestry.com and its popularity and availability to the "Wiki-World" has meant that you can't always take what you find by making a search as being correct. Large Language Models (LLMs) have and will make this worse.
Burke and Massue
Sir Bernard Burke and Melville Henry Massue are possibly the biggest sources of geneological misinformation. It is widely known that both are "untrusted" sources and have been known to "fabricate" connections and speculate the relationships between nobke families, however they are often use by more recent historians are sources.
I have also fallen into the trap with some of my reseach. I think that I have some mitigating factors.
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