I am constantly amused at the nonsense I run across while rooting out the family tree….
Today, while chasing a few leads, looking for information, actual, factual, documented, information… I was looking for info on a McCurdy, and while searching at Ancestry.com I find a couple of trees purporting to be Barack Obama’s family tree, and it’s tied to one of the McCurdy lines I was looking at.
There are undoubtedly some McCurry’s in our Presidents family tree, but someone wanted to tie him to the McCurdy’s it looks like so they have connected Edward McCurry as the son of John H McCurdy.. not a far stretch, names sometimes get changed… the problem is, they show Edward with a birthdate in 1790, and his FATHER John, born in 1792!! Edward was born in Kentucky, John in South Carolina… so, two years before John was born, he had a son, several hundred miles away!
Someone posted that once… okay, they made a mistake… but then other people have copied that information, blindly, PURE IDIOCY! No documentation listed for any of it, just blindly copying someone else’s mistake and perpetuating it. Never mind that fact that there is actual documentation showing that John H was married to someone entirely different than the mother listed for Edward, and that he is neevr shown to live in kentucky at all, even if the dates had been different.
So first I see that, then while working a Williamson search, still trying to find that McCurdy connection, I find a Stephen Williamson born in South Carolina in 1799, apparently his father was a virile old bastard, because he was 80 when Stephen was born… and he passed that virility to his son, because it appears Stephen had his first son at the early age of 13 and was a victim of child molestation because the childs mother was 14 years older than Stephen….
Does no one check for facts, or at least reasonable continuity when they do their research?
Seriously, it’s a great hobby, but don’t just grab at straws to make things work when you hit a brick wall, and don’t trust other peoples leaps of faith either! If someone else posts something that looks like what you want, look for corroborating evidence! I’ve been searching for ties to my great great grandfather for years and years now, and I have some theories, but without substantial evidence I sure won’t be publishing them as if they were fact!
~Jim