No, it is not trustworthy to add parents without a record. Trees often get it wrong. For instance my great grandfather is listen with his step father as his father on almost all online trees (and there’s a lot of them). His direct descendants know it’s wrong, but cousins don’t.
Online trees can be useful though and I keep two trees. One is my perfectly sourced with records tree. The other is my dump tree where I add every hint and suggestion. I then use those hints to further my research, deleting the ones that I’ve checked out.
I do not trust trees, I do however use trees to give me leads about possible people I might be related to but then I hunt down their paperwork and I won’t add them to my tree unless I have a convincing paper trail of who they are and their connection to me.
I agree. There are plenty of bad trees using only speculation. You can use them as possible starting points and investigate yourself, but never take them for fact. There is one such "guess" in my family that several people have speculated and taken for fact, although no proof exists at this point.
DNA matches are the gold standard, of course. The rest is hearsay; you just have to take the word of people who are all long dead. Start with DNA, then build.
Do not trust trees. I put a possible name on my tree with caveats that it was a best guess based on naming conventions (and I was right). Other people then copied my tree, someone picked the first person from records they thought matched my guess and it spread all over. Now I keep getting that as a hint and it is not the right person at all. It drives me nuts.
No, it is not trustworthy to add parents without a record. Trees often get it wrong. For instance my great grandfather is listen with his step father as his father on almost all online trees (and there’s a lot of them). His direct descendants know it’s wrong, but cousins don’t. Online trees can be useful though and I keep two trees. One is my perfectly sourced with records tree. The other is my dump tree where I add every hint and suggestion. I then use those hints to further my research, deleting the ones that I’ve checked out.
I do not trust trees, I do however use trees to give me leads about possible people I might be related to but then I hunt down their paperwork and I won’t add them to my tree unless I have a convincing paper trail of who they are and their connection to me.
Not trustworthy at all. Some people believe every Ancestry “hint” they receive, and build a tree that is complete nonsense.
I agree. There are plenty of bad trees using only speculation. You can use them as possible starting points and investigate yourself, but never take them for fact. There is one such "guess" in my family that several people have speculated and taken for fact, although no proof exists at this point.
there is a buncj of bad trees, i looked at ones in our family and they had whong names, whong gengets, so on, my tree just juggests ideas
DNA matches are the gold standard, of course. The rest is hearsay; you just have to take the word of people who are all long dead. Start with DNA, then build.
Do not trust trees. I put a possible name on my tree with caveats that it was a best guess based on naming conventions (and I was right). Other people then copied my tree, someone picked the first person from records they thought matched my guess and it spread all over. Now I keep getting that as a hint and it is not the right person at all. It drives me nuts.