Ancestry/Genealogy

Never rely on someone else's trees for reliable information. The most I ever do is to look to see what their actual sources - meaning records, not yet someone else's tree - and see if those are accurate. And then I check to see if the record they used as a source is correct for the person I am researching. Often it is not.

I ran into a series of trees about an ancestor of mine, an Aaron Harlan. Now, in that line, there was a series of four or five Aaron Harlans, father to son, etc. That series of trees had Aarons married to their mothers, or to their son's wives, or various other combinations. How screwed up is a tree when they list a man as being married to a woman who died before he was born?

I only bother correcting inaccuracies for actual records, mostly transcription errors for census records. Most notable was the surname transcribed as both "Lucker" and "Fucker" when it should have been Tucker - not the same Tucker, either.