"Common ancestors" not working

[JFB]

In my experience most people who complain about errors in other peoples' trees don't do this, so other users are not forewarned, and the tree owner has no compelling reason to amend their tree.

In my experience, even with polite evidence of the mistake, it is either not replied to or illogically rejected "because the name is right" and the the date and place are "about right", "so it must be correct". Some people are very reluctant to change the "amazing" discoveries Ancestry has made for them.
This is why I think that Ancestry need to provide a mechanism for their experienced PAYING SUBCRIBERS to flag up and trigger a re-evaluation of ThruLines connections. In reality I find that once a ThruLine is published on day zero, it does not change permanently unless the day zero source trees change, and I think a lot of them are replicas of each other, building up a "weight" of pointers to an incorrect connection. ThruLines does not appear to take account of, or add weight to, subsequent investigation and refining by others, or even the number of Ancestry sources attached to the new evidence.
And yes, I know that this does probably not meet their business plan. All they want to do is to make sugar to attract more and more new amateur subscribers. The serious people like us are big enough and ugly enough, in their mind, to take care of ourselves.
But this doesn't stop the accidental proliferation of online disinformation.
Finally, thank you Peter for providing a forum for this sort of discussion. I hope that somehow Ancestry become aware of these things, there is no obvious means of raising it with them.

 

[cfbandit]

In my experience, even with polite evidence of the mistake, it is either not replied to or illogically rejected "because the name is right" and the the date and place are "about right", "so it must be correct".

The new emphasis on comments should really help. For awhile, I've been leaving comments on trees with my Daniel Graves ancestor who have the wrong parents for him (his parentage is currently unknown, and people have hopped onto all sorts of nonsense). For example, this one is one I left 11 months ago.

"Goodness you have made quite a conglomeration of people here! Okay, the North Reading, Mass Daniel Graves - The Daniel Graves that was born in North Reading, Mass and died in 1865 was actually a different Daniel Graves that married Mary Ferguson. He was married to a different woman, Caroline Wellington, and had children with his second wife Sarah Pinkerton Dickey at the same time as Daniel and Mary were having children in New York. The New Hampshire Daniel Graves - The Daniel Graves here was married to Polly Allen in Ackworth, New Hampshire. They were having children Galen, Sarah, Almira, and William at the exact same time that Daniel Graves and Mary Ferguson were having their children in New York. In both cases, if you are descended from Daniel Graves and Mary Ferguson, can you please remove all references to Reading, North Reading, Mass, and New Hampshire, as all of them relate to the OTHER Daniel Graveses? Thank you!"

The icon is now a bright green for comments and it appears under the birth/death info, so its MUCH more obvious that there is a comment there. Christa Cowan mentioned on the genealogy tv video she was on as well that Ancestry planned to do an email of comments as well to make it more obvious. Sadly, I don't believe anyone who has this information in their tree has fixed it, but I hope the researchers of the future see it and read it and know to be more cautious.

The hazards of having up to 38 variants of the same name in different places at the same time, sigh...

 

[cfbandit]

This is why I strongly believe that for those Ancestry trees where the owner profiles themselves as "advanced", Ancestry should add a button to "mark down" an incorrect link on the ThruLines page, and to request a re-evaluation by the algorithm.

The last time I asked an Ancestry rep about it, they replied it was too difficult to do so. I've asked Crista Cowan on one of her lives before as well and she towed the same line, so I believe it is genuine.

I had one Thruline that was incorrect, because my DNA connection and her associated family members missed a generation. I added her line through to the DNA connection, tagged them in my tree, and it didn't go away for months. Checking today, I saw it was gone. Which is also a problem, since the DNA connection is legitimate, with her ancestor and mine being brothers, which means they'll never see the correct version of it. If I hadn't added them to my tree and tagged their DNA profile, I would have never been able to find them again to message them.