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<blockquote data-quote="donna723" data-source="post: 417239" data-attributes="member: 1883"><p>One thing you have to be very careful of when using Ancestry.com - what it shows on some records may not necessarily be true. It gets very tricky. You have to check and double check. The old census forms were handwritten and some census takers had better handwriting than others. And I assume that it was like it is today - some guy comes to the door asking questions and he wrote down whatever they told him, nicknames and all. My paternal grandmothers name was Mary Margaret. Some censuses show her as Mary, some as Mamie and some as Mayme. So if I was searching for "Mary Margaret", it wouldn't come up with "Mamie" or "Mayme". And a great grandmother on my moms side was named "Katharine" but different censuses have her as "Catherine", "Katy" or "Katie". And it doesn't help that all of them named their children after relatives so there would be two or three of them with the same name.</p><p> </p><p>Something else you have to be very careful of ... when you put someone in your "Tree", it will come up with hints to tell you that this person is also listed in someone elses "Tree" and you can connect with theirs and see what they have on them. But that doesn't mean that what they have is necessarily right - it could be completely wrong! It might be a close relative that you knew personally but only a distant relative that this other person knows nothing about! And when you search through the records, there's thousands of people with the same names! I've seen lots of them where people had been given a completely different set of children than what they really had, or people who were listed twice like they were two different people, once under their real name and once under the nickname.</p><p> </p><p>I was very lucky in that one of my cousins has done very extensive research on our grandparents ancestors so I copied a lot of mine from hers. And she has lots of old family pictures that I had never seen on hers and I also copied all of those.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="donna723, post: 417239, member: 1883"] One thing you have to be very careful of when using Ancestry.com - what it shows on some records may not necessarily be true. It gets very tricky. You have to check and double check. The old census forms were handwritten and some census takers had better handwriting than others. And I assume that it was like it is today - some guy comes to the door asking questions and he wrote down whatever they told him, nicknames and all. My paternal grandmothers name was Mary Margaret. Some censuses show her as Mary, some as Mamie and some as Mayme. So if I was searching for "Mary Margaret", it wouldn't come up with "Mamie" or "Mayme". And a great grandmother on my moms side was named "Katharine" but different censuses have her as "Catherine", "Katy" or "Katie". And it doesn't help that all of them named their children after relatives so there would be two or three of them with the same name. Something else you have to be very careful of ... when you put someone in your "Tree", it will come up with hints to tell you that this person is also listed in someone elses "Tree" and you can connect with theirs and see what they have on them. But that doesn't mean that what they have is necessarily right - it could be completely wrong! It might be a close relative that you knew personally but only a distant relative that this other person knows nothing about! And when you search through the records, there's thousands of people with the same names! I've seen lots of them where people had been given a completely different set of children than what they really had, or people who were listed twice like they were two different people, once under their real name and once under the nickname. I was very lucky in that one of my cousins has done very extensive research on our grandparents ancestors so I copied a lot of mine from hers. And she has lots of old family pictures that I had never seen on hers and I also copied all of those. [/QUOTE]
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