Barking Up the Wrong Tree: A Genealogy Far, Far Away

24 November 2014

A Genealogy Far, Far Away

"Our registered users have created more than 60 million family trees containing more than 6 billion profiles. They have uploaded and attached to their trees over 200 million photographs, scanned documents and written stories." [source]

Ancestry.com frequently touts their numbers. Of the trees I've seen I would estimate at least half of the "photographs" are actually clip art and other genealogically useless images. When you factor in trees back to Adam & Eve or Greek mythology, how many profiles are also genealogically useless? And then there's the trees. How many of them are just plain junk?
Do a search for your favorite fictional book, movie or television character and you are bound to find them somewhere in Ancestry's Member Trees. A search for Darth Vader brings up two trees for Star Wars characters and another tree created by a dog breeder who has 7000 dog profiles on 5 different trees. Then there are these gems. Each one is a tree in its entirety, minus any profiles for living people.

✿ ✿ ✿

Last but not least, a tree created by someone with the sense of humor of a three year old:

Thanks to Louise for the idea for this post! ;-)

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2 comments:

Anna BayalaWednesday, 10 December, 2014
Your post has me laughing here because it speaks to the nonsense you see on Ancestry. I also posted something similar on my blog. I got fed up with people linking my ancestors to their imaginary trees and then to top it off for Ancestry to give me worthless hints. I finally removed my tree from the website as I couldn't deal with the ridiculous trees or the annoying leaves on the website. Its a "click add me genealogy no investigation" website. I never noticed what you posted above but it falls into place with all the other nonsense you see there. LOL
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UnknownFriday, 19 December, 2014
Finding one's roots is tough. It's where you had to, or are at least made to, sift through a lot of primary and secondary documentary materials, since it takes a lot of people to build a functioning civilization. Having said that, a lot of those will definitely be aided by good scanning and data-gathering software. Good thing there are a lot of easy to obtain services for that. All the best!

Roberta Scott @ Spectrum Information
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Blog Reviews

Barking has been "deemed offensive to [Ancestry.com's] brand" and is banned from their Facebook pages. In Ancestry's "Community" comments with links to Barking are censored.
Dear Emma, Hannah, Jemima, Mary Jane, and all of her other personalities agree that I use "the banner of 'education' to actually mock, deride and laugh at [Ancestry's] own customers" and I "can make [my] point concerning tree inaccuracies & cock-ups and their effect on our 'hints' system without being downright unpleasant and sarcastic about it."
Allen says, “your cute little blog is a waste of bandwidth at best”
Ann thinks I'm "...copying and pasting mistakes on trees and calling it a blog" and that my readers are "mean-spirited people...who like to have a laugh at the expense of others."
Sue was really offended by the “...continual stream of sarcasm and constant poking fun...What a nasty taste in my mouth your blog left me with. Unpleasant, sarcastic and jeering at people who you obviously see as your intellectual inferiors. Won't be reading that again.”
And finally from Les, "You truly are a horrible woman, pointing out mistakes is one thing but blatantly laughing and taking the p is completely out of order."

Why?

Researching our family histories we are bound to make mistakes. Hopefully we are quick to correct them. Unfortunately some people refuse to read or think before adding information to their family trees. Some trees have been abandoned so the errors are there for eternity. Here we will laugh, mock and shake our heads at the carelessness, stupidity and/or ignorance of those errors.
All examples are taken from trees published online.
I'll also post tips occasionally, though the messed up trees are a great example of what NOT to do.
If you have an online tree to suggest for a future post please send me a link: buwtree(at)gmail(dot)com

The Fine Print

1. Copyright: Barking Up the Wrong Tree is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License and is owned and administered by Loretta Gillespie.

2. Content: Barking Up the Wrong Tree is responsible for the content of this site, not including visitor comments. Barking Up the Wrong Tree reflects the personal views and opinions of Loretta Gillespie.

3. Credit: Credit is not given to tree owners to protect the clueless. A tree owner who discovers their tree on this site should correct their mistakes so no one else realizes they were once a clickophile.

4. Accuracy and Validity: While there are helpful pointers on Barking Up the Wrong Tree a majority of posts are intended to be humorous. The disastrous trees are copied exactly as they appear on Ancestry.com. These trees are being used to show others what NOT to do.

5. Images: Attempts are made to source images used despite the fact that the trees they are taken from do not include source information.

6. Comments: Barking Up the Wrong Tree will exercise its right to delete comments which are deemed to be spam, offensive, childish or just plain stupid.

7. Liability: The content at Barking Up the Wrong Tree is not to be taken as fact nor absolute. Barking Up the Wrong Tree contains posts that are humorous and posts that are research tips. Barking Up the Wrong Tree is not responsible for anyone who cannot tell the difference between the two. The sites that Barking Up the Wrong Tree links to via hyperlinks are not under its control. Those sites are responsible for the content of those sites. If you do not find the humor on Barking Up the Wrong Tree to your taste then stop reading. If you choose instead to send an email to the owner it may be published on Barking Up the Wrong Tree and mocked publicly.

Thanks to Thomas MacEntee for allowing the use of the GeneaBloggers terms as a template.