Louis Charles Couvrette m. Marie Philomène Chauvin
Family Tree from Ancestry.com
I came across the tree from Ancestry a few days back, while looking for information on some folks in my own tree. It can be entertaining to look at what other people have done, and you never know when you might find a source you didn’t discover on your own. But this tree? It is made of NOPE. The person who made it took a census record for a family with a similar name, added the kids from that record to their family, and made frankenfamilysoup. Seriously, does the name Walter seem likely? Marjorie? And no, Louis Charles did not have a second marriage, nor did he have phantom children named Ernstine and and Albertine. Total fantasy.
I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the family now, based on scans of marriage, baptismal, and burial records, supplemented with a pretty robust run of census records for the US, Canada, and even state censuses from Minnesota. Everyone I’ve added left a paper trail behind. And it’s a paper trail that cross-checks itself. Marriage records list both parties’ parents’ names. Baptismal and burial records list both of the children’s parents names. The kids are in the census (unless they died), living with both parents. The parents are found in the Canadian census living with their parents, backing up the marriage record. I can track the family’s migration from Quebec to Minnesota, and I can even pin down their immigration date to between 1881 and 1885, thanks to census records.
I think I’ve got a pretty solid case. I don’t know what the person who made that tree was smoking, though. So be careful with what you take from public family trees. You could get lucky, but you could get led far astray, too.
red paper boat 