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Someone from branch of my family (not Forest of Dean branch directly but someone who married into a descendant of it) has put a family tree on the Ancestry website. Though some of the information they have is correct some of it isn't. For example they have said one of my great aunties died when she was three years old when, in fact, she was in her 90s, I knew her well and I am still in touch with one of her grandchildren.

I can only gain access to it via the public library's subscription of the city where I live,(I am too mean to pay for a personal subscription!!!!) I have tried to flag up the mistakes and that I have some photographs I wish to share with them but I am afraid of posting my e-mail address as, in the past I once put a previous e-mail address on such a site and had so much spam as a result I had to change the e-mail address and abandon the old one.

Is there any way of alerting the people, who put the family tree on Ancestry, to the fact that some of what they say is inaccurate without having to go through the laborious process of adding a note to each individual person on it rather than to the whole tree? I would just like to attach one note to the tree to state what I think they need to reconsider in the light of the information and photographs which I have.

Is it possible to upload photographs to it using such a subscription rather than a personal one? In other words does it only permit the originator of the family tree to add to the photographs?

I have been hampered too by the fact that the council's connection to the site jams regularly, and it says there is a connection problem which makes it difficult to stay on it for more than a few minutes, though I have flagged this up to them today and on previous occasions.

P.S. Was near the Forest last week but was unable to stop and realised how wide an area it covers.

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Hi,
first "welldone" for being a cheapskate like me, true careful Vurrister methinks !
I kid myself that by not paying the subs I'm doing it the long-hard "proper" way....altho sometimes I do wonder why not just pay out, there are cheap ways if carefull, especially when the library site starts playing up.

Re your library internet speed/reliability of service:
I guess the quality varies hugely depending on size/"importance" of your library - I use the main Hillingdon(a West London Borough) library which covers six floors and has 2 dozen internet terminals etc etc. Usually the net service is very good but occasionally they do have server technical issues that really slows things up, fair enough but I wish they'd tell me when I'd phoned to book the slot. I strongly suspect if I went a mile or so away to one of the far smaller branch libraries their typical normal speed would be slower.
Also of course it depends where in the UK one is. eg do Forest and other rural libraries have fibreoptic (ie superfast) broadband yet I wonder, I know we do here, how about where you go ?.

I also know the speed/reliability of ISP service varies with time of day. I'm lucky and can go anytime during the day/week; the later in the afternoon/early evening it definitely slows up, no doubt as more people are using the library networks.
Similarly I suspect it might slow around lunch time, hence I use the terminals between 2-4pm. I wouldnt think of trying weekends for the same reasons, plus the library's always far busier and noisier (altho the net might be fine?).

I'm also sure the UK Ancestry website itself slows up towards the evenings/weekends, part because more UK users log on after work/school etc AND also because thats when the USA users are waking up & logging in too. This is also affected because the main Internet Service Providers, be they BT or Virgin or whatever, are getting more demand from home users after school/work as they watch online tv etc etc, so they may throttle some services to spread it more thinly, hence the libraries get a lesser share (due to local government cost restrictions/commercial agreements I think).

Does this seem logical/comparable to your experiences ?. I mean have you noticed any particularly good/poor user times/days with your library, have you tried changing the time of day and/or day of week you use the service, I know the internet speeds/reliability of service can and do vary depending on the usage drain.

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Re other peoples posts:
I have never subscribed to Ancestry or shown them any form of payment not even for a "free" (?!) trial. However I have signedup so as to use their website mainly to create my own family trees on, I like their format/presentation, plus I get their email newsletters. I did this BEFORE I started using the library to actually download the data(for future loading onto my trees from home), I don't think the Library Ancestry Accounts permit users to creat trees etc. Occasioanlly I will also take advantage of their free access periods eg Armistice Weekend, or last year's extended free 1911 Census access, and during those times can search and load census forms etc onto my tree the quick automated way. Normally my Family Trees are set to "private" for just my viewing. However last year I was surprised to receive an email from another Ancestry user who had seen one of my trees online, I'd forgotten to set it to private access only. Their email was unfriendly & abrupt "I've been researching this family professionally for x years and have never seen a lady called Kit in the family...". Because of his rude arrogance it unfortuantely took me a while to "remember" to tell him that "Kit" was the family's pet name for Katherine and surely he should know that....!?. I then promptly reset this tree to "private".

SO, as far as this amateur knows, yes you can receive Ancestry emails from at least SOME if not all tree owners depending perhaps on their privacy settings and definitely without my paying subs fees; whether I can email other tree owners without paying I'm nt sure. However I have also very occasionally posted against threads on the Ancestry Forums - maybe thats a way to approach this ?. Can't you click the relevant thread owner's user name and doesnt it give the option to email them that way ?.
Mu suggestion is try it from home (assuming you have home internet access of course which I'm sure you do) by first signing up for Ancestry emails/trees ONLY as I did.

Hope this helps if only a little, I'm sure others will know for sure.
Atb J.

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.. and you think you have problems, spare a thought for the WoS folk :-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-21800196

--
Ἀριστοτέλης A Gloster Boy in the Forest of Dean ><((((*>

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Jefff and Slowhands, neither of you surprises me. Here in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty we are sometimes fortunate to obtain the services of a reliable pigeon.

It comes as a surprise to many not only that we have such nice scenery but also that Surrey is the most heavily wooded county in England in terms of percentage of area despite the population. This means lots and lots of trees to fall on oversubscribed power lines. Quite apart from frequent power outages, I subscribe to genesreunited, and when I try (with the owner's consent) to get onto a tree with more than a few hundred names, I wait long enough not only to make a cup of tea but also to bake the buns to go with it. I therefore sympathise with the frail of Westbury and foam with jealousy at the news of Hillingdon's facilities :-)

I wonder also, by the way, to what extent you find Ancestry reliable. I've come across quite a few instances where Mormon-owned data is questionable. From what meagre grasp I have of Latter Day Saints' theology, it seems they are big on genealogy because they interpret one verse of the Bible to mean they have a duty to discover and baptise people by proxy long after their death. This means once they've got a name they won't let it go. As a result, if their information is challenged, they may put a footnote on IGI or whatever, saying it "may" be unreliable, but they won't delete it. This seems to me to be a pity, as Mormon data is often the only on-line source for pre-1837 information if you can't get at a parish register. I've had a good talking-to by a fellow researcher in the Cotswolds for adopting unreliable info in such a way as to allege bigamy!

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Hi all,
Slowhands, as you know I do sympathise with their problems, particularly NHS wise - I wasn't complaining about the library/ISP situation here at all. I'm well aware of the often poor internet situation throughout rural areas all over the UK, similarly lack of many other infrastructures such as public transport, health services, public libraries, schools, etc etc. I'm sure much of this is due to our Governments' reluctance to support industry & technology since the 60s compared say to our near neighbours in Europe (for example I visit France regularly, seemingly a huge sparsely populated agricultural country of lovely scenery - yet they took the internet aboard long before we did). In the UK the power & money is most certainly & unfairly kept within the supposedly affluent South East - affluent if you work or live deep in the City/Westminster where the net's needed to help the money literally talks....our Government seems more interested in trying to still be a World player than sort its own backyard out I feel. But hey thats more than enough of my politics on this forum, never to return !.

I don't know what "city" Rookancestry lives in, or his/her knowledge of what affects ISP connectivity, that's why I stated my own situation to try and illustrate that even with my generally good local foundations the service will still vary from time to time for good reasons, some of which we can work to our own advantage. Hopefully my experience will help their query, but surely others know more than I to answer the queries abt Ancestry etc, please ???.., come on guys...

Please Peter don't be envious ;-) yes there are a few bonuses to living here but sadly I cannot think of too many others at all and there are many much more serious & unpleasant reasons not to live here and I would move back to the Forest or any other of UK's rural areas today if job & schooling circumstances permitted....

Re the LDS resources. When I started this great hobby as with everything I do I researched as much as I could, all the text books say to treat the Mormon resources with care as they are prone to errors. Imagine my genuine surprise when I saw that the huge Ancestry site openly admits to using LDS resources albeit only in the small print !. This was a surprise, since then I've seen their transcriptions can ocasionally be so very "interesting" compared to the likes of FindMyPast (which our library also has, thank goodness); whether this is a factor of their LDS resources I do not know.
I genuinely think the LDS website is a God-send (no pun intended!) especially to cheapskates like me but like everything in life you rarely get something for nothing. Unfortunately as we know there are many people in this world who genuinely believe "if it's in black & white it must be right"# and that includes all sorts of websites and therefore public family trees.

Which is what makes this FoD website such an absolute, genuine, bargain of course !!!

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PS: I type this while listening to the online commentary of "my" Hereford United FC, losing after our goalie just gifted an easy away goal in our "homely" non-league stadium that we still love - mentally if not physically I'm light-years away from the Chelsealike "prawn-sarny" mentallity that many football fans would associate with my ISP address: not sure whether that scoreline is a good advert for local internet services but I'll take an embarrassing defeat that I genuinely feel a part of to watching the local big boys on TV or even in person !!. What I'm trying to say is that the internet has helped my life in so many ways, particularly socially such as this great hobby of Family History; I guess internet connectivity is like the M25 - we may moan when it's not working well but it was far more difficult without it !
# This saying does, of course, apply to the above mentioned football club.... ;-)

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Even today, the IGI/LDS is the best thing since sliced bread. It was always known that it was not complete or totally accurate. I used the 1988, but revisions since have added a great deal. I'm stuck in the early 1700's in Monmouthshire, but when I was spending a lot of time at the Registrars in London getting back to 1837, I noticed the professional genealogists were often carrying the little printouts from IGI.

They have Family History Centres around the UK. When I lived in North Hampshire, I used to go to the FHC Reading, Berks. They had a mass of records, including the 1851 Census for most or all of the FoD. The volunteers were very pleasant and helpful and I don't remember it costing anything. This was 10 years ago or more.

This very positive experience went all the way back to Salt Lake City. I wrote to them, always got helpful replies and they used to only charge less than 50p for copies of items from their records.

Sometimes, if you're really lucky, your family might jump off 2 or 3 pages from early years to 1837. Just out of interest I followed a line from a married couple from my wider family who resided in Redbrook and died in the 1860's and 1870's and are buried in All Saints, Newland. The male line went back to Wedmore, Somerset in the 1500's.

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Hi Roger,
thats great to hear especially from someone with far more experience & knowledge than me.
A quick query if I may - you mention Wedmore, Somerset.
I know nothing about this place or it's history or even location, but I noticed it seemed prominent in the Glos county results I was seeing from LDS site when I did some research for this forum a few days ago re the Hawkins family.

Is this coincidence, is it because Wedmore used to be a more important hotbed of thriving activity in past centuries perhaps associated with the coalfields, or is it just because Wedmore is one of the perhaps few sets of Glos Parish Registers that have been transcribed onto LDS so appear often during searches ?.
If you've researched that locality's history I'd appreciate your thoughts when convenient, please, thanks.

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Hi Jeff,

You're too kind. If I was any good I wouldn't have been stuck around 1700 for 10 years or more. I know nothing about Wedmore but looked up text and images last night. Looks like a delightful old English village/town. Rural, agricultural and market by the look and sound of it. Best Wishes.

Roger

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Hi Roger,
yes Wedmore looks lovely & no disrespect at all but clearly not a former "hotbed" of life, no particularly famous people, industries, etc etc that I can see. I'm surprised to see it's only a few miles from Wells - a place I've visited many times as headoffice site of a former engineering employer of mine - yet I've never heard of it.

"WEDMORE, a parish in the hundred of Bempstone, county Somerset, 8 miles from Wells, 6 S.E. of Axbridge, and 4 from Shapwick railway station. It is situated on the turnpike road from Highbridge to Wells. The parish, which is divided from the hundred of Wells by the river Axe, and bounded on the S. by the Brue, contains the tythings of Wedmore, the Borough, Churchland, Blackford, and Northload. Its name is said to have been originally Wet-Moor, owing to its having been under water nine months in the year; but within the present century it has been extensively drained. Wedmore is a polling place for the county elections, and an ancient borough governed by a portreeve chosen yearly at the manorial court, with water bailiffs, constables, and other officers. A court leet is held annually."
From The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868)

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/SOM/Wedmore/index.html
http://www.wedmore.org.uk/wedmorevillage.htm

So I wonder if the reason it came up on the searches I did was maybe it happens to be fortunate in having large sets of PRs on the LDS database, whereas other Gloucestershire towns do not ?. From the above - "Wedmore is a polling place for the county elections, and an ancient borough"
Perhaps it's prominence is linked to it's closeness to Wells, small & quiet yet the home of a beautiful Cathedral and so the Bishops & their Registers ? Or maybe it's just that the Hawkins name that I was researching is particularly prominent there, like the Doones of Devon ?
Ah well.

Anyhow, sorry for drifting away from the original query from Rookancestrybest, if anyone else can please help with that, please ??? Thanks.

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Yes, if Wedmore is well represented in the IGI, it is because all or a lot of extractions of parish records were undertaken. When I was originally checking IGI for Mitcheltroy, Mon. there was nothing at all.

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Jefff: if you're researching Hawkins I've got one way back. Edward Hawkins married Ann Bedoes at Awre in 1701, and (although I think it's only IGI for the three earliest generations and I've only got it from one fellow researcher living in Lydney) he was my father's mother's father's father's father's wife's great-grandfather. The Awre register entry says Edward Hawkins was "of Newland." The Newland transcriptions on here give baptisms of Edward Hawkins in 1651 and 1672 but I don't know if either was the Awre bridegroom.

I can also reveal that I've been through Wedmore. It was a dull, cold day with sleet in the air. Didn't hang around, and didn't notice any reason to go back. Fortunately Wedmore is slightly elevated on the Somerset Levels, between Rivers Axe and Brue. Otherwise it might have been submerged in the recent weather.

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Search engines bring up quite a few items of 'Hawkins' in Wedmore.

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Thanks for those suggestions guys, I'm sure the original poster Sheila Selby will study them with interest. My research was related to her current thread re Selby / Hawkins. Personally I wasn't considering the Wedmore branch as being relevant to the search (wrongly perhaps?), it was just that Wedmore kept appearing among LDS's suggested "hits" from Glostershire PRs for our target William Henry Hawkins b1885.

http://www.forum.forest-of-dean.net/index.php?mode=thread&id=40404#p40445

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My posting seems to have started a debate here!!

However, must say I've usually found the Latter Day Saints' info. accurate though there are sometimes mis-transcriptions. It's sad that these days not as much from their records is as accessible as it used to be as it now directs people to the subscription-based Find My Past for info. which a year or two ago was accessible from their own website.

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I thought we lived in the electronic age but it appears we are sometimes closer to the stone age!

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Thank you all for these detailed responses I very much appreciate them.
I use the free access part of Ancestry very frequently at home and it's reliable at any time of the day, it never seems to let me down at all from home, but it is the public library where the problem arises using their membership subscription. I suspect they use broadband rather than fibreoptic though fibreoptic is available in the area and has been for several years. It's a city in Yorkshire which is strapped for cash and they are probably not investing much into these resources.

It's usually in the day time and happens on Saturdays in the same way as weekdays. Knowing how disorganised councils can be it might be the council's fault for not maintaining its server properly as I think it could be a server problem.
I will ask for feedback on my comments to them when they have been given chance to investigate it. I might make an official comment about it too on their site.

Glad that my comments about being too mean to pay for an individual subscription were received with the same kind of humour which I wished to convey!

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Tonite BBC is offering a US episode of WhoDoYouThinkYouAre ?, so dare I say I expect another set of quantum leaps via the US Civil War to the Pilgrim Fathers... altho despite my reservations it can still be an interesting programme.

Tonight's star is Edie Falco, not having the foggiest idea who that is I googled the subject; bearing in mind our recent discussions re Ancestry Family Trees I thought this first "hit" was interesting to say the least ! I'm not certain but despite references to European subjects the poster does appears to be American, or at least resides there, and writes

"At this point, I want to advise all amateur genealogists. If you go on to Ancestry, there is a good possibility that you will find some unsourced tree that goes back multiple generations, possibly centuries. You will think, “Hallelujah, the work has all been done! Look at how many ancestors I can trace.”
Caveat emptor. Ancestry trees are notoriously unreliable. Unless you do the work yourself or can validate the source material of another’s tree, take nothing as truth. It is entirely possible that someone somewhere made a mistake (or twenty), like the one that belonged to Edie Falco’s mother."

By posting this I'm not trying to restate what may be obvious, just thought it interesting given the timing.

Re the programme Edie (a lady actress apparently) travels to Cornwall so I'll definitely be watching with added interest.

http://tracingthetree.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/edie-falco-who-do-you-think-you-are/

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Wedmore is known as The Isle of Wedmore as it used to be surrounded by water just like it was in the summer of 2012. It used to claim that Paul Francis Gadd aka Gary Glitter lived there although I do not think they acknowldge it now for obvious reasons. It was close to Athelney and Muchelney Abbey's lost to Henry V111.

Hawkins is a very popular name in Somerset. In my village of Shepton Beauchamp there are many of them.

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