First, a rant.
I’ve been spending too much time in the genealogy subreddits and the Ancestry user group on Facebook. It’s doing my brain in.
There’s this belief that I’m finding is depressingly popular, that because people pay for a service, they should be entitled to use it on easy mode. So people get angry when other Ancestry users don’t message them back, or when other users don’t have public trees. Or they are dismayed that it isn’t possible to wholesale copy entire chunks of other people’s trees. How very dare. I was called an ugly, selfish person for trying to explain why people might not have a tree on Ancestry, even though they’re a member (shockingly, many people build their trees offline). Apparently those people don’t belong on Ancestry if they aren’t feeding the hint machine.
And all of that is largely Ancestry’s fault. Their marketing shows how you just add a little information, and suddenly you’re inundated with all these shaky leaves, and that’s how you build your tree. It’s certainly something, but is it genealogy? It seems to me like it turns into a giant member tree circle jerk.
And when the Ancestry hinting interface changes, somehow the world is ending. Oh no, the tree hints are only being doled out one at a time. And oh no, you have to do more examining and more clicking through to accept hints. While extra clicking isn’t usually a good thing, I think anything that slows people down when adding garbage to their trees is a good thing. How dare, again.
I’m not looking to gatekeep genealogy, but people just copying the copies of the copies of the copies of the copies, with all the mistakes and just plain nonsense included, isn’t genealogy. And you end up with 50 identical, incorrect trees that drown out the few good trees that are based on actual research.
I’m really not even calling this person out, because there are a million more like them. People who build their trees entirely online from hints. Never mind that the world is vast and Ancestry is a closed ecosystem, even in terms of what’s available online. Research is hard work. It is time consuming. Believe me that I understand that. But these people think they’ve discovered a shortcut where no shortcuts exist.
And a cautionary tale.
I started working on this problem years ago, and finally was able to put all the pieces together last summer. It involves two families: Pat Basquil and Catherine Moor, who were both born and died in County Mayo, Ireland, and Patrick Basquill and Catharine Giles, who were both born in County Mayo, but immigrated to Stockport, England, in the 1850s.
Pat Basquil and Catherine Moor lived in Kilbride, Kilcodnuff Civil Parish, County Mayo, and had at least five children. Some I’ve found in baptismal registers, and the others I’ve been able to link to them using marriage and other documents that included their father’s name or their townland. Patrick born about 1835, John born about 1839, Bridget born about 1840, Thomas born 1841, and Catherine born 1848.
Daughter Catherine is the important one. She immigrated to the US and married Thomas McDermott in 1873 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She and Thomas had at least 6 children, all in Philadelphia, and Catherine died there in 1915. Her death certificate identifies her mother as Catharine Moore.
The other family, Patrick Basquill and Catharine Giles, lived in Creevagh, Ballintober Civil Parish, County Mayo. Creevagh and Kilbride are not anywhere near each other, so anyone paying attention should know not to conflate the two families. And anyone who has done any research into the Basquills should know that there were two main groups in County Mayo. One centered around Swinford (Pat Basquil and Catherine Moor) and one centered around Castlebar (Patrick Basquill and Catharine Giles).
Patrick Basquill and Catharine Giles had at least seven children: Catherine born about 1839, Judy/Julia born 1841, Margaret born about 1842, Rose born 1843, Patrick born 1845, Anne born 1848, and James born 1850.
Again, daughter Catherine is going to be the important one. The family with most of the children immigrated to Stockport in the 1850s. Daughter Catherine married Thomas Hannagh in 1857 in Stockport, so they were there by that time. Then in 1860, Patrick Basquill died.
If you look at the death record, the informant is Patrick’s son in law, Thomas Hannah, from the same residence. So if there were any doubt that the Catherine who married Thomas Hannagh was the daughter of the Patrick Basquill who died in 1860, this should help clarify things. And things do need clarifying.
The family is still in Stockport as of the 1861 census, with widow Catharine Giles as head of household. Children Julia, Rose, and Patrick, along with daughter Catherine and Thomas Hannagh and their four month old son, Thomas, are living with her. They next show up in the 1870 US census, living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Catherine and Thomas Hannagh had six children altogether, with three living to adulthood: Thomas J. Hannon, John Patrick Hannon, and Catharine Hannan. Thomas Hannagh died in Cincinnati on 13 June 1870, and the census is taken on 25 June, so he missed the census by 12 days. I was able to find his obituary, luckily (he was “killed by cars,” which I take to mean streetcars).
In 1880, Catherine remarried to Patrick Connama. They had one daughter, Alice, in 1881, but she died in 1882. Patrick had six children with his first wife, Bridget McGarry, who died in 1877.
So, you see, the two Catherines are clearly not the same person. One died in Philadelphia, and the other in Cincinnati. Both leave a pretty well documented paper trail. But somehow people have conflated the two families. If you look at Ancestry member trees, you’ll see that there are 58 trees that have the Patrick Basquill who died in Stockport in 1860 married to Catherine Moore. Bonus points for the random addition of James to his name.
I looked at every one of those trees. All but one have Patrick married to Catherine Moore. That lone one has him married to a woman named Bridget. Catharine Giles died in Princeton, Indiana in 1889. That seems random until you dig a little more and see that her daughter Julia (baptized Judy) married a man named James K. Page in Cincinnati in 1867. James Page’s family was from Princeton, Indiana, and that’s where James and Julia settled after he left the Army. Julia died in 1919 in Cincinnati, and her death certificate names her husband, James Page, and her parents: Patrick Basquill and Catherine Joyls.
I wondered where this mess started, and I think I figured it out. In 2009, someone very helpfully shared the following info on an Ancestry message board. They’ve got the Swinford family, along with the daughter Catherine who was baptized in 1848 married to Thomas Hannah in 1857. She would have been NINE years old. They try to massage the birth date to fit better, but it still doesn’t work (not to mention the 1848 baptism date is was correct). If they’d stopped right there and done a reality check, they would have seen they were about to make a mistake. They should have also noticed that the Patrick baptized in 1845 was born in Creevagh and could not belong to a family in Swinford. The same for Rose. So they’ve grafted two of Catharine Giles’ children onto Catherine Moor. And now there are 58 trees on Ancestry based on this frankenfamily.
So when I see people justifying just copying from other people’s trees, I think of this sort of problem. You aren’t going to be able to spot or fix these sorts of fundamental errors if you’re just copying info from other people’s trees.
I’ve uploaded a gedcom of my own tree (a work in constant progress!), in an effort to mitigate some of the nonsense. I’ve also been correcting the FamilySearch tree as I go. But even though my Ancestry tree is public and allegedly searchable, it doesn’t come up in searches. So if you search for Patrick Basquill who died in 1860 in Stockport, all you’ll see is the wrong trees. Kind of depressing, especially when you have people calling you names and saying you’re being selfish.
red paper boat 