Soap Box Rant with a Twist of Egg in my Face

I could not begin to tell you how many times in the past I would write to people online to advise them that they had some wrong information in their family tree.  Did I ever hear back from them - no.  Did they change their tree - no.  Did I give up trying - yes.  I hate to admit it, but yes I finally gave up.  I thought the most I could do was to make my tree open to the public and site sources and then any researcher doing their due diligence would find the tree and the sources.

So many times I have found the infamous "Portrait Palins" being the parents of people born in Staffordshire, and Shropshire and we all know that the children were born in Cheshire and baptised in Aldford.  Was it because of the "portraits" that people wanted to claim them as their own?

Never in my wildest imagination would a DNA test pick up a match with an incorrect tree!  This is what I got this week.

Wow!  This is exciting! A perfect match to a direct Palin ancestor!  Or so I had thought.  I looked closer to the matched tree.

Not even similar - not the same name, not the same location.  What gives?  So many scenarios cross my mind - has ancestry did a huge snafu - could all this DNA stuff be a hoax?

So then I took a closer look at my tree - to try to understand why the computers at ancestry would think John Pain would be the same as John Palin.  Ohoh - looks like this snafu is all my fault.  In my haste to build a public tree on ancestry - I  just built a tree with direct ancestor's names.  I had not gotten to the part of adding dates of death or birth or locations.  This brings to mind the adage - "Garbage in - Garbage out"

Okay - so the above tree is obviously not a Palin link, but the DNA match is supposed to be 5-8th cousins.  Judging by the location I would imagine it might very well be a paternal link.

Taking this one step further, I have come to realise the DNA test will supply matches on the DNA, but again it is up the user to provide precise ancestor information to find that common ancestor.

For any of you who may be skeptical of getting your DNA tested - there was a great show/test that was recently done and I am thrilled to say that ancestryDNA fared the best.  You can see that show here.