Diminishing Authenticity
It’s happened again. I saw red when I followed an Ancestry hint. I’m fuming and I have to rant. When I logged on to Ancestry I had 116 new hints waving at me so I decided to filter them and only look at the ones with photos. For one ancestor this was great because there was a photo of him. Well I’m guessing it’s him because the person who posted it says it’s him but there is no source quoted or even names or dates. The photo is just attached to this person. Fingers crossed it is him but I need to verify that.
Then I saw the name Martin Grady and a photo of a ship and I jumped. We have almost completed our Martin Grady book and know this man’s life inside out as far as we can from the distance of almost 200 years… and we don’t have ship photos. My anger started mounting though when I saw the name of the ship and immediately knew it was another Martin Grady who came out on another ship and lived another life to the one who is our ancestor. Why did I get angry? Because this so called “researcher” who obviously couldn’t research enough to find her own house in the dark had attached this ship to OUR Martin. But what makes it worse is that HER version of OUR Martin will lead all the other name gatherers to add this photo hint to their trees and then they will research THAT Martin and think it’s OUR Martin and his story will be forever changed.
Not only will it be changed but his memory will be completely tarnished because HER version of OUR Martin ends up charged with bestiality and going to jail on and off for most of his life, whereas OUR Martin was the complete opposite in character and made a very respectable life for himself and his family here. GRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
What is the sense of emailing her? Really. I mean what is the sense? I’ve done it before and have had people ignore me or tell me to “prove it” like they are some almighty research expert. It’s like a Christian and Atheist debate. The Atheist says please prove your God exists and the Christian says prove he doesn’t exist. I really think Ancestry needs to come up with some way to filter out name grabbers. I don’t know how and I know it is the nature of people to just take anything they can for free, but, really, this is doing such a disservice to Ancestry by diminishing it’s reputation amongst serious researchers.
I guess all it would take is a very large warning sign on entry to the site saying that the only records you should take as fact are those from documents. Or it could take all member tree hints out of searches unless you tick a box to include them. I don’t know, but it has spurred me on to finish my Martin book and get the real word out there on his life.