G.K.
We are constantly surprised, and invariably frustrated, when researching at ancestry.com for further ancestral information. Don’t get me wrong, Ancestry.com is a brilliant website and a goldmine of information for any serious researcher who enjoys grabbing a hot cup of tea, a notepad, and hours of carpal-tunnel-causing mouse clicks in the privacy of their own home. But it’s one drawback is People. People want exciting history. People want stories to tell to other People who have boring families.
What would Great Great Grandmother Mary think if she knew that One Person mistook her marriage to be in Victoria to an escaped bank robber, rather than to Great Great Grandfather Fred in Queensland who did nothing more dishonorable than pull the middle out of the hot bread left on the water tank of Mrs Phipps, his next door neighbour, when he was 6 years old. He got a whacking for it when he got found out and that kept him from a life of crime forever. That One Person labelled Great Great Grandmother Mary as the bank robber’s accomplice and so began her extremely fast descent into the annals of History Horribilis because that one Person put that on ancestry.com.
Other People got little green waving hints on their Great Great Grandmother Mary and they saw the bank robber association and ran with it. Soon everyone who was researching Mary had her and her non-existent husband down as their version of Bonnie and Clyde. Genealogical Kleptomania … a.k.a G.K. It’s out there. It’s contagious. It’s rabid. It’s going to become a very big problem.
Ancestry.com is currently running advertisements on television in Australia which is their right of course, but, take a look at them to see just how this G.K. can breed. The worst one is of Jack Byrne, The Husband. A typical Australian bloke who just wants to know a little more about where he came from. He’s got that Ocker accent (well rehearsed) and he’s wearing casual clothes (must be winter though because the obligatory t shirt and shorts are missing although his sleeves are pulled up a bit to show he’s not going to be taken for a nancy boy) and you immediately think he’d like a beer at a bbq as he twiddled the rabbits ear aerial to get the telly to work to watch the Aussies beat the Poms once more in cricket (yes, the ad must have been shot a while ago ). Enough from me though, watch it and form your opinion.
Not only is he looking for Old Bruce and Mabel (enough to make any self respecting Aussie cringe at the stereotypical names) but he found a pub. Hallelujah, he’s found the Aussie Bloke’s Pot of Gold. A pub. And he’s going to try and get that pub back. Forever and a day until death do him part, Jack Byrne, The Husband, is going to tell everyone that he comes from a line of publicans and that they owned the biggest, the best, the most controversial pub in the history of Australia. It will become family legend. He’ll tell his children and they’ll believe him. They’ll tell their children….and so on.
At the next bbq when the esky is dragged onto the makeshift cricket pitch to be used as stumps, his mate, Davo, will say “Oy, Burnsie! While ya there, throw us over a stubbie willya? After all, you come from Proper Pommy Drinking Stock. ” And then there will be raucous laughter and much back slapping and Jack will secretly puff his chest out and pull up those sleeves just a little bit more. But maybe what Jack didn’t know, was that in the ‘historical records’ he was ‘guided to’, the Bruce he found was in fact ANOTHER Bruce McInerney from the OTHER side of Melbourne and not his Great Grandfather at all. Jacks’ Great Grandfather Bruce could actually have been a teetotaller milkman. And so why did Jack think this was his Bruce? Because he didn’t know “the first thing” about family history and so just accepted the work that others had done as being gospel. He also mistakenly accepted that the document he was ‘guided to’ with Bruce McInerney’s name in it was the ONLY document in existence.
It’s kleptomania research style. Or as we older Australian’s like to say “It’s a Claytons Genealogy” The genealogy you have when you’re not having a genealogy. Beware of People.