Public Tree–Love or Hate?

Last night I was helping my 13-year-old son look at a few things on his FamilySearch family tree. He was interested to see how far back some of our family lines have been traced. One line of my dad’s family is very Danish, and I’ve researched it extensively. It’s one of those lines with which I am very familiar. I know when the records stop. I know where there are gaps in the church books. And I know what challenges exist for extending the line. To my surprise, that line has magically been extended by several generations. I was so curious to look at the details to see if someone has cracked into Danish estate records or something else tricky because the church records for the parish start in 1700, and this line now extends to nearly 1500.

To my frustration, Peder Pedersen of Brovst Parish in Hjorring County has been given birth parents from Bornholm. He also now has a marriage happening in Arhus. Check out the map below and notice how far these places are from each other. Also remember that we’re talking about someone who was born in about 1700. There was no way to easily move from place to place—transportation consisted of a horse or your legs.

This is a problem I see all the time. Well meaning individuals start linking families together and merging individuals with the same name and same dates, not realizing that there are separate family groups being merged. This problem with my tree just happened last week. And the irony of that is I spent all last week untangling a client’s tree where three men all named Peder Jensen from three different parts of Denmark were all merged into one entry. That resulted in my client having an ancestor on his public tree with three sets of parents, three overlapping marriages and so many children.

Public trees are awesome. They give us a really good way to collaborate with distant relatives. They have great tools built in to suggest records and indexes that include our ancestors. But what do you do when this crazy merging happens to your tree? My approach is to find vital records in each location for the person with the repeated name. I will find the christening, marriage, burial, and census records for the name of the individual in any location named on the public tree. Yes, this takes a lot of time and brain power to get separate families fully documented. Typically, when I do this thorough research, I can flush out the unique family groups. I try to expand the research beyond just my individual. I want proof for every person in that messy merge so I can prove why we have two (or three…) separate people that each need his/her own entry.

The next question becomes, how do we avoid causing this type of problem for others when we work on a public tree? We need to do solid research and verify every suspicion we have with sources to prove our ideas. Over the coming weeks, I will be posting a series of articles regarding methodology specific to Scandinavia. I call these linking patterns. They help us know that we have the correct family group without missing anyone and without adding extra people. These linking patterns are key to becoming a great Scandinavian genealogist. And I will keep you updated with my progress on fixing my tree on FamilySearch!