How much of this tree can be plausible?

Question

Someone in my family made a tree for my grandmother's side of the family and while the first few branches check out, the tree shows way back into B.C. times and I don't believe this tree then, when did records of birth begin? Surely some of this tree is wrong, right?

Answer 1

If you work at it long enough, most people with Northern European lines can get back to Charlemagne, almost always through the illegitimate child of a king and a commoner. From there you can get to Adam, if you believe everything you see on the Internet.

That you ARE to Charlemagne via a b*****d child is often a question. Kings liked to brag about their prowess, and, given the choice, many unmarried women would rather give their fatherless child the name "LeRoi", wink wink, than tell their family they had been fooling around with the stable hand.

Records of birth began at different times for different people. States in the USA began civil records of births and deaths in the 1800's to early 1900's.  Family Bibles, with space to record names and dates in the front, started in the 1700's. Church records of baptism and funerals were earlier than that. How many church records survived 400 years of fire, flood, worms, the fury of the Norse, the fury of the damnyankees, the fury of the {abc} invaders, is another story.

The best comment on reliability vs. time I ever saw was a fellow on Roots Web World Connect. His data base had the header title "All records before 1700 for Amusement Only".

Look at the sources of whoever did the tree and verify, verify, verify.

Answer 2

I have seen on Rootsweb some lines of my family tree that someone else has posted, and like you, the first few generations check out as they are pretty easy to verify........but then if I follow the links in their tree back far enough, they claim to have us as descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene; Noah; Adam and Eve; and even mythical people such as Athena and Zeus.  I mean, really now.  That is not even remotely plausible.

Answer 3

If there's no documentation as to where the information was recorded then, yes, I would doubt the authenticity. Also if someone in YOUR family made it for your grandmother then it must have been someone now alive. How could they have found those ancient records? and know the language? Maybe they just copied one they found and filled in or replaced the more recent entries.

Answer 4

I'd think it was wrong, aside from the lack of records people 500 or so years ago didn't even have proper surnames like we do today so how would you trace a particular family?

Answer 5

It really can't be well documented going back that far.  In other words any tree going back that far probably would not meet professional genealogical standard of documentation.  There are some Roman nobles families whose families can definitely be documented back to the early first melennium.  Also, there are a couple of families, the Massimo, being one of them who claim their family tree goes back to the Roman Republic, and it might but it is hard to find records to establish anything that goes back that far.

Johnny, I think you are seeing what a lot of us have found out.  Information in family trees on ANY website must be taken as CLUES not as fact.  Even when you see the same info repeatedly by many different subscribers on the same people that is no guarantee it is correct.  A lot of people copy without verifying.  Also, I understand, some people will make up a lot of stuff and speculate on things for the fun of it to see how many people will copy.

Answer 6

The English royal family tree contains names of people mentioned in the bible and has documentation for everything (they have used the bible, dead sea scrolls, and the works of ancient historians like Josephus). They have full time genealogists whose only job is to extend the royals genealogy. It is really amazing. It can be done if you have several researchers and hundreds of years time.

Once you get back several generations you will have so many blanks on your pedigree that any document or record with names will yield new data for your pedigree. Remembering that at 24 generations there are 5 billion blanks to fill in on everyone’s pedigree, add one more generation and the number of blanks doubles. There are more people living on earth now than have ever lived in the past.

Plausible? yes. Mistakes or fabrications? likely.