Genealogical Misinformation

The more research I do the more I regard what I find on genealogical websites with suspicion.

A search for the most associated name for the village and the village name returns, not surprisingly, the Hall and the businesses associated with it (holiday rentals). It also returns listings from Ancestry.com relating to a member of the family from the 19th century. While this result is not incorrect, it is an indication of the prevalence of the GEDCOM database.

Due to the nature of the GEDCOM database, allowing users to upload their own "research", errors will get included in it and will be picked up by regular Internet searches and now more worryingly, ChatBots.

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Royal Descents and Pedigrees of Founders' Kin

Royal Descents and Pedigrees of Founders' Kin and The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal (Henry Massue) are 19th Century documents that are often used by those contributing to the "wikis" that are "feeding" the GEDCOM database.

Asked about connection between John Helion and Nicholas Berners

Yes, there is a connection between John Helion and the Berners family. Alice Swinburne, daughter of Sir Robert Swynbourne, married John Helion of Bumpstead Helion [wikitree]. Margery Swinburne, Alice’s sister and joint heiress to her father, married Nicholas Berners [flicker.com].

There was a third reference back to me.

Asking ChatGPT where the information came from:

Yes, there are several online genealogy websites that have family trees showing the connections between John Helion, Alice Swinburne, Margery Swinburne and Nicholas Berners. One such website is WikiTree, where you can find a profile for Joan (Botetourt) Swinburne that shows her children, including Alice and Margery .

Joan Botetourt was born around 1353 in Belchamp Walter, Essex, England. She married Sir Robert Swinburne before 13 November 1372 and they had four sons (William, Geoffrey, Andrew and John) and two daughters (Alice and Margery). Alice married John Helion and Margery married Nicholas Berners.
Joan Botetourt died on 4 March 1433 in Gunnerton, Northumberland, England .

Joan Botetourt’s mother was Joan Gernon. Joan Gernon was the daughter of Walter Dalyngruge and Margaret Chamond. Joan Botetourt was therefore a member of the Gernon family through her mother.

Information from the GEDCOM database and LDS

It is not that I am personally frustrated that some of the information that I have found about my ancetors is wrong or has been confused by the linking of two individuals with the same name, as I am not really interested in my own history rather than that of the village that I currently live.

Making a search for "what does the American Geneologist think of GEDCOM" I came across a Reddit post that was less than complementary about Ancestry.com and LDS in general. Some of the thoughts that I have formulated seem to be shared with others in this regard. The critisism of LDS and Ancestry.com seem to be in line with what I have concluded. There was talk about "acredited LDS Genelogists", for which I can see that there are none! Also that LDS and Ancestry have made a lot of money promoting "Who do you think you are?" in taking celebrities and producing TV programs that trace their history back through time. While some of this may be factual, it is often highly speculative.

The post on Reddit

This is quite a long post and it had been labled: TL;DR (Too long;Did't Read)

For close to 20 years, I’ve been researching a particular branch of my family tree who spread out across the United States from the early 1700s through the late 1800s. Like many colonial American families, the records start to get scarce at a certain point and many connections are difficult to verify.

A while back, along with other researchers, I realized there were two different men with the same name who settled on opposite sides of the same state during the late 1700s. For a long time, it was assumed they were the same person, and their family trees were combined in many online sources. However, upon closer investigation, one of the men typically used a middle name or initial and the other did not. They lived at least 150 miles apart, according to land records and the 1790 census, which shows them in separate districts. In the last few years, multiple Y-DNA tests from the descendants of these men are showing two completely distinct, unrelated family lines. Nevertheless, thousands of Ancestry trees and other sources continue to show them as one person.

Above is only the start of the post as it does go on for much longer. Ironically the comments on the post are just as long and repeat the original post - thus proving that it was not too long as others have read it and report that they too are frustrated by the commercial nature of Ancestry.com.

My examples of this are John Botetourt and William Harris. Both of these names refer to seperate persons, father and grandson in the case of Botetourt and probably cousins in the case of Harris. The result in both cases is that the geneological records have a tendancy to confuse them as the same people. Agin in both cases further research reveals that they are different people albeit related.

In the case of Botetourt there is a further confusion in the parentage and the false assumption that John Botetourt, 1st lord, was the illegitimate son of Edward I. There are many cases I have found that this error is stated clearly in published family trees.

Genealogical Misinformation

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