It's that family tree, usually with 10,000 or more people in the tree, and almost zero documentation. Sure, it's a ton of dates of birth and deaths. Even some places of births and deaths. But when you look at the information, the "mother" started producing children at age three and sometimes continued to produce children up to a hundred years past her death.
Marriages aren't documented. Most don't even have dates of when marriages happened.
Mothers and fathers tend to move around years after their deaths.
What can you take away from such a tree? Nothing. Not one thing.
But...
No, it's a fiction tree. Because so much is wrong, undocumented, there is nothing in that tree that is of value to you.
Sadly, it's those bulky fiction trees that get used the most. Oh, look, I found great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma in this tree. I finally have information on her. No, you really don't. Stop yourself from saving that person/information to your tree. Do NOT click on that button.
But...
Don't do it. If you do it, then someone else comes along and sees that information in two trees and believes it must be true. So they click on it and save it to their tree.
But I can save a copy of that picture of great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma to my tree, right?
Deep breath. Do you honestly believe this person vets their pictures any more than they vet their "facts"?
How do I know this is a fact? Because I know the vetting that went on with this picture. My mother made this copy from the original. How can I be sure? Well, seeing it with my own eyes helped. But for the nay sayers, there's more proof.
The original is hanging on the wall above the couch. I was in that house many times as a child. I personally knew the adults in this picture. I know the children who are in the picture. The elderly man is William's youngest son. The elderly woman sitting close to him was William's daughter. I can trace not only the people in the picture, but what happened to the picture of William and Mariah, his wife.
When I posted my copy of this picture on ancestry.com, I attached to it who reproduced it from the original.
Others have taken this picture and attached it to another William Birdsell born in 1772. It's not him. I've tried to get them to remove it from their William Birdsell.
Sadly, it's useless to attempt to do so. For many, especially those who have Fiction Trees, they just want a picture of anyone with that name on it to make their information more valid. No, it doesn't validate your wrong information. All it does, to those of us who actually like documentation and provable facts, is make everything in your tree useless. It makes you look lazy.
It also makes a lot of us embarrassed when we learn we really are related to you.
There isn't any way to stop any of this. I wish there was, but there isn't. Lazy, sloppy people exist in every aspect of life. Please understand any information you find in a Fiction Tree is just that--fiction. You can't trust any of it.
Remember, only you can stop the Fiction Trees.
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