There are probably people who would look at my tree and say…. that’s wrong, they don’t match the people I have… and you would probably be right and I’m not even going to say that my tree is the correct one. There are times that I enter information that was correct at the time and still may be correct but I haven’t been able to prove it one way or another.
Like my Beaton family tree. When I originally entered it, it was what my true belief was at the time. Or my genealogy tree vs my genetic tree. You see the family story was always that my great-grandfather; William Beaton was adopted by his father but the lady that raised him was not his mother. So I’ve worked a lot on my Beaton family tree and I feel like I know them all, well, kinda like family. Heck I’ve been to Kingston, Ontario on many occasions and spent three weeks last summer trying to figure out the family dynamics.
Then last summer I convinced one of the Beaton descendants to do an autosomal DNA kit and found that she and my mom were not a match and they should have been second cousins. I do know that doesn’t mean I’m not a Beaton descendant but I know it means that someone isn’t. So until I can have another descendant take a DNA test I’ll have to wait.
So what do you do? Do you take down your tree? Or do you leave it, sort of like bait on your fish-hook hoping for a bite to see if you can figure out the mystery? I’m going for the bait. That’s why I never look at other people trees and use the information in my tree. I always like to prove things for myself. Not that I’m saying they are bad researchers but perhaps they too are just throwing out that bit of bait to see who bites.