Quote:
Originally Posted by Badger52
I mention all this not to disparage what the companies provided you, but I wonder if the online ancestry companies commonly reach a dead-end around this point in recorded history. No dispute, historically, there are camps on both sides adamant that Arthur existed... or on the flip-side that he was a (necessary?) myth. I have a cousin who took my Mother's side of the family back to the early 1300's but then had to pretty much throw in the towel due to the difficulty of finding verifiable records. (She posed the question, if there's only 1 record of something how is it verifiable? lol)
I'd be curious to hear what you find out & what sources take you further back.
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I am going to say from my experience there are dead ends and/or a point you reach where there is no way to verify the person is the person you are looking for, at which point it is a guessing game.
Also, when it comes to family Trees on Ancestry, MyHeritage, FTDNA, etc they rely subscriber input so it's garbage in garbage out.
For instance in my adopted paternal family some old hens got together in the 1950's-60' and concluded that the patriarch of the family was a former Lt. Governor of the State of Virginia who had the same name and born in the same period. They went as far as getting papers notarized to authenticate their accuracy. These documents permeated family trees for years and provided bogus data across hundreds of trees.
It took 3 YDNA to proved those documents to be wrong. Despite this there is still a family member who pollutes the Ancestry database with that inaccurate information.
Another in my maternal family member is a writer. He moved to My Heritage to 'write' his own version of the family history. He sent me a bio on a family member that was complete fiction, and that is what subscribers can and do pull into their trees.
Most of the AncestryDNA matches with family trees do well if they get back to their G-Grandparents. That's it, that's all they know about their families. Those that do get past G-Grandparents, many merely point and click on what comes up in their hints.
Family Search says my 13th G-Grandfather is an Indian Chief from back East who married a white woman...a Grand Sacum or something like that. No way for me to prove that, but it's a pretty cool possibility
