Discouraged :-(

Hi patti,

Yes, there is a lot of wishful thinking & mixups in online trees. But I've found that the collaborative nature of the Geni platform really helps (by helping each other) get the the tree sourced & accurate.

May not help my "brick walls" so much - but the lines in Colonial America anyway keep getting better.

Raise discussions from profiles you think might be wrong at the "upper" branches especially; "closer in" is easier to document because we have more records.

Good idea, Erica. But of course we still descend from Charlemagne, lol!

If we have Western European ancestry .... :)

Yep--I do and I'm sure you do, too. Grandpa Charlemagne pretty well populated the Western Hemisphere!! ;-)

Big Charlie got around a lot - at least four wives and five concubines, plus who knows how many casual affairs and one-night stands. Not surprising he's everybody's great-x-granddad.

People of continental Asian ancestry have a similar "problem" with Chingis Khan....

My solution to the problem is to let the truth come first, then there are no problems at all to accept whatever outcome or changes that follows.
Some days ago I cut of Christian IV as a direct forefather because I couldn't justify the path that would have needed two 10-13 years old girls in a row to become mothers, that and the fact that the individuals who made that relationship didn't put up any single fact made it easy.

What I do have problem with is people who have some kind of agenda, political or class related, who destroys legitimate lines because it doesn't suit there interests, (one man wouldn't accept a "simple" farmer as his forefather to that noble man, because he was just a farmer.)

Then you also got groups who take control over thousand of profiles, but never put up a single document, but will take away every changes they notice, and last, just demented people who can trash anything by random merges out of nowhere or just by following some random source on the net, making innocent people have to clean up the mess for hours afterwards.

Then we have the different scales of profs, someone accepts two out of 7 letters in a broken piece of a clay tablet as a guilty proof, other demands just everything in written form fully attested from the cradle to the grave and would hardly accept a common spelling mistake.

People make mistakes today, people have always made mistakes, at least one fact out of ten could easily be wrong and the bigger amounts of data makes an even bigger pile of error, but people have in all times tried to glorify themselves or the group they belong to, that is a part of what's called the human culture.

I agree entirely. Many cuartors are gulity of mistakes like that. Some do it intentionaly others as honest mistakes.