More real, less illusion

Justin:
Thanks for your posting in response to http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-as-Illusion/30589

1. I agree that it is important to think about what we are doing when we do genealogy.

2. We need to hear first hand from those who want Geni to keep the lines (relationships) between reality and fantasy so they can express their position in their own voices. If their argument is that “we can all tell the difference between real and fake” I submit that it is not at all clear that everyone who posts on Geni knows the distinction. If a person blurs the lines between reality and fantasy we are seeing the nub of this project, the illusion that that there is no difference between reality and fantasy or that the difference does not matter. If enough people blur the lines Geni itself drifts toward illusion. Yes, it is important for each of us to think about the line between fantasy and reality in our own work (or is it play?).

3. The question whether Geni is an elaborate game can be assessed in part by examining the characteristics of games. One reference is the 2012 book “Characteristics of Games” by George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield and K. Robert Gutschera. These authors are described as three of the most prominent game designers working today (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/characteristics-games). They cover computer games in their book. To what extent are the characteristics they describe reflected in Geni?

4. Is Geni a phenomenon? In other words to what extent are users of Geni influenced by their personal perceptions, what they notice when engaging details during their engagement with Geni?

5. Let’s not think of reality as absolute. Jeff Landers and Joseph Rowlands cite Francis Bacon in a description of the primacy of existence, saying “reality is not subject to wishes, whims, prayers, or miracles” (http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Metaphysics_RealityIsAbsolute...). As we engage genealogy through Geni do we recognize our own cultural biases about reality? Taking genealogy to its foundation is there only one absolute reality about descent from First Man and First Woman? Do we even think about this or care about this? Are we so committed to finding relationships that we sometimes suspend evidence-based reality in favour of speculation?

Yes, I'm curious about the arguments of those who don't want to disconnect mythological or unproveable connections. I have seen religious arguments & perhaps that's not worth much of a battle, but I think that may apply to less than a handful.

I do tend to pay little attention to "deep history" relationships except as a useful measure of tree more or less correctness.

Of course there's a computer game aspect to Geni, it's what makes it "sticky.". Perhaps it's the game goals & rewards that need development ....

Erica:
Thanks for your posting in response to http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-as-Illusion/30589.

Your classification of "more or less correct" is interesting. It may lead to notions of forgiveness and conditionality. Do those of us who insist on accurate data in the family trees sometimes "look the other way" under certain conditions, forgiving some speculative conclusions as we proceed? If so, what are the parameters of the conditions and do those parameters have limits? We could enter a discussion here about logic, syllogisms in particular. In "Murder in the Cathedral" TS Eliot refers to "living and partly living". Maybe as genealogists we accept both reality and illusory "part reality" in our trees. Ah, the fuzzy penumbra of genealogy, the "more or less correct" evidence that we sometimes accept in genealogy. We have illusion, reality and now "illureality", a hybrid of illusion and reality.

Your reference to the stickiness of Geni speaks to the attraction we have for it, an attraction which might be addiction for some. Your "sticky" phrase makes me think of Csíkszentmihályi Mihály's concept of "flow", the highly focused mental state that some of us experience when we undertake genealogy. Any successful game has stickiness or flow and many of us are smitten so much with Geni we spend long hours at it. But does the stickiness blind us to the distinctions between real evidence and illusory evidence?

Oh, I totally love this project.

To my mind, we create much of what we think of as reality through the stories we tell -- and even when on Geni the family lines are no more than profiles that contain names and dates, they are still story telling. They say, "I come from people who lived here and went there." They connect into history. And history can be scholarly history, which depends on evaluation of sources and the creation of logical arguments, or it can be family history, which depends on the stories being passed down through the generations, or it can be even older oral history, which existed before writing, and eventually made it into manuscripts and then into print.

I have both a scholarly bias -- being a scholar -- and an oral history bias -- being a story teller.

The lines often blur, though in general I see a generic distinction.

It depends on where the stories come from.

And yes. what we each of us individually, and what we all of us as a group, want out of genealogy in general and the World Tree project in specific, does indeed reveal our biases, and the story telling needs we have.

We need to be connected to our global cousins, or we need to see how we might be connected to history, or we need to know that we are special somehow, or we need to be able to see a path that connects us to our gods.

To my mind, all of the stories are "real," in that because they are valued and retold, they give a picture of who people think they are.

And none of them are "real," in that even with as much good evidence as we can muster, good solid scholarly sources have their own biases, and will have included some things and left others out.

What I like is clarity about where the stories come from.

Thanks for inventing the project!

Great points already.

My family stories don't go back very far. On one side, the immigration from Europe, with a lot of "sha, we're in America now! We ran for our lives from the Cossacks, good riddance to old Europe, speak English!!!"

And the other side is the "go West, young man" peopling of America.

So i would add to Anne's oral tradition vs written tradition the "imagined" family. Genealogy for me is trying to figure out who they were based on really skimpy facts. A lot of the time I get it totally wrong (not the facts, the imaginative bit) and need to change my concept.

Re: It may lead to notions of forgiveness and conditionality. ...

Yes, it does. Without the wayback machine we may be getting it sort of wrong but sort of right. Statistically my descent from Charlemagne is (virtually) certain, but the details of who, how, where etc could be laughably wrong. So do I claim descent from Chuckie ? Sure, why not, math is on this side.

So I've thought further, and I have more.

There are categories of stories that really bother me.

One of my colleagues says that the life of a medievalist mostly consists of explaining to people that Really They Were Not That Stupid Back Then.

Case in point: one day we were discussing the poem "Sir Orfeo" and Orfeo was having his ten year grief fit in the woods, and one of my students said, "I read once that in the Middle Ages they used to send the insane people out into the woods, is that true."

And I said well, I'm sure that some town somewhere during that very long time period sent some insane person into the woods to get rid of them, for I have met the humans and really I wouldn't put anything past them, but no, it wasn't a general custom and I would love to find out where that notion came from.

And she found it. And it was a note in a scholarly history. And the evidence was from one of the romance poems.

Which is like saying that in America in the mid 20th century they had a horrible problem with amnesia, and your evidence being several soap operas.

That sort of storytelling is harmful. When we do it to existing humans from other cultures it can lead to actual physical harm. When we tell it about the past, we make ourselves feel superior, I guess, but it obscures our real connections to other cultures.

I also hate it when we romanticize either the past or other cultures. But that is a different post.

Ooo, lovely Discussion - thanks for inviting me, William Arthur Allen. I really like the Game Theory analogy to Geni: At what stage does the risk of trusting someone not to maliciously damage your tree, become worth the Pay off of connecting to millions of other family trees freely given? When do you realise that we all risk inaccuracy together? Until you do, blame and forgiveness mean something different on Geni than they will come to.

On your point about accuracy - and the question of people's capacity to tell the difference between fantasy and reality to the detriment of Geni, you have drawn me in, as I am (theoretically) qualified to assess the degree to which people are using accurate 'reality testing' or are being sucked into the stories they are telling themselves about (usually) their family. Game theory applies here too.

But it’s the delusions about the reality of what it is crowd sourcing data is actually doing, that so many people manage to maintain (half the Curators on Geni included) that fascinate me more than the simplistic positivist notions that historical accuracy outside the story is something genealogy is capable of re/producing.

Anne, you make some outstanding points about story telling. Indeed story telling is such rich ground that we could devote a separate discussion about it within the "Geni as Illusion?" project. Are you prepared to start a fresh discussion on "The Role of Story in Geni"?

For now I offer a few reactions to your comments.

1. Geni profiles as story telling: Hmmm, I will shift my focus a tad to take in this perception.

2. Oral history does not necessarily predate manuscipts. For 45 yeras I have studied pictographs painted on vertical rock surfaces in wild and subtle locations on the Canadian Shield of the upper Great Lakes of Ontario and I have been with Indigenous elders as they "read" the stories in the cluster of panels and as they "read" the elements of the stories that are embedded in the surrounding landscape and honour the spirit of the place. Even the word for pictographs in Anishinaabemowin means "writing" as well as "painting". The readings at pictograph sites by these elders are not a very different process than the readings from the pulpit to the illiterate masses of medieval times. Oral presentatioin and written presentation overlap in use. Genealogies presented in oral form as stories have broader scope than the rigidity and restrictions (some would say manipulation or propagandizing) of written templates within genealogy programs, Geni included.

3. I really like your observation that the World Tree project "reveals the story telling needs" that we have. I tried out your concept by going to my Geni timeline and writing a story about a special personal experience in 2007 and I posted two related photos. I chose a story with a New Mexico connection because I know that you live in or near Albuquerque. I realize now that I have had a need to tell this story for a few years and only because of your thoughts and the structure of Geni did I get it off my bucket list. Just the process of writing the story was cathartic for me. The feeling was very real, very positive, not at all an illusion. As you point out, stories are very real. If you want to check out the little story see http://www.geni.com/profile/6000000033239086683/events/600000003882... . I will be using my Geni timeline much more from now on to tell stories. You have influenced me profoundly and positively with your observation and I thank you for that.

4. Your story about Sir Orfeo is wonderful. One anecdote doth not a history make. The story speaks to our sampling techniques, margins of error and to the extent to which we apply the rules of evidence in our own research as we move to greater certainty of the relationship between adjacent nodes in a family tree. The Sir Orfeo story can be a mnemonic for us as we play/work. To reach certainty or high probability of reality in our research conclusion, instead of illusion, we would be wise to keep Sir Orfeo in mind.

Sharon Lee, you are demonstrating that this discussion is not just an exchange of ideas but is a call to action. I really like your description that some of the concepts we are discussing have immediate impact positively on the process of assessment that you use in your role as a Curator. We all are very fortunate to have you serving as Curator. (The role is so important that I spell it with a capital.) What you are saying may help to envigorate other Curators. May the force be with you.

Erica:
What wonderful observations! Let me assure you that your tree goes back as far as anyone else's whether you know it or not. You are real and so are your ancestors, even if they are hiding. You are in the joyful process of "Hide and Seek".

Let me illustrate with a story. Some years ago I decided that I was going to make some unique turnings on a wood lathe. I had no background in the craft. I bought and installed a good quality lathe and went to a master lathe-master to learn the craft. But the lathe master did not start with choice of tools or choice of wood or recommended techniques. Instead he lovingly and slowly turned a block of wood over and over in his hands as he spoke quietly. He said, "Inside this block of wood is a beautiful vase which wants to escape from its bounds. Your job is to effect the release. If you are not gentle enough the wood will fly off the lathe and destroy your work. If that happens assess what caused the accident, thank the wood for what it has taught you, apologize to the wood, forgive yourself for your mistake, and start over with another block of wood and another image of what is locked inside the new block. This time be gentler but be observant and persistent." Wise words. Wise man.

The inner hidden vase is just as real as a completed vase. The hidden ancestor is just as real as you are. Using this perception when considering your hidden ancestors you will be amazed (and thankful) for the creative problem solving that will emerge from your being. You already are incorporating this process in you "imagined family" as you use hypothesis, testing for evidence, revising the process, pondering where novel proofs might be found. Go find Waldo.

William, I cannot open the page to the story! This is Very Bad, as it is a story. And I want to read it.

Thanks for the correction about oral and written stories. I do know they aren't actually linear and consecutive. I should not have simplified.

I've been thinking a lot lately about stories and how we construct ourselves. There are stories we are told about what our family is like, or what we are like. There are the stories we tell about other people. There are the stories we tell about ourselves. All of these stories can be modified, rewritten, thrown out, even. But it takes consciousness and willfulness. Courage, often.

One's own timeline tab is private to the family. To share a story, perhaps a project, as it also has image capabilities in the Wikitext.

I fooled around with a "blog format" project here

http://www.geni.com/projects/Rogerenes/28141

My concept was to digress into topics inspired by the act of collecting profiles into a project.

Still a format in progress. Geni has more project format enhancing on their wish list.

Already there are so many strands of thought here it's daunting to choose one and add to it. However, this piece stands out for me:

> Maybe as genealogists we accept both reality and illusory "part reality" in our trees.

My first thought is that to some extent "reality" -- especially social reality -- is a bargain we make with the world around us.

When we are doing genealogy we accept the idea that certain things are important but other things aren't. For example, our culture tends to define family by biological relationships rather than social relationships. If I want to "do genealogy" I should be looking for my biological parents, grandparents, etc. Other facts about my world, such as the names of my mentors, and the intellectual lineage of their mentors, don't count because that's something else, "not genealogy". We have agreed that this is what genealogy means.

Along the same lines, social relationships that mirror biology might not count. The biologically driven definition might be expanded to include adoptive parents, but not other kinds of parents. For example, if I participate in a culture where This Man is my Father because he is my father's brother or my father's blood brother, that doesn't count for genealogy. He's really just my "uncle" or just my "father's blood brother" (an interesting story but not a "real" relative).

This line of thought is interesting but it doesn't have any practical value (unless you happen to belong to a culture that emphasizes social relationships).

It begins to have practical value when the same line of thought is applied to problems about how to treat questionable information in a genealogical context.

As genealogists, we have probably all encountered a problem where there is a family story that might or might not be true. Maybe you've found evidence it isn't true but other researchers refuse to accept the evidence because they'd rather have the story. Or, maybe there's no way to prove or disprove the story. You think it's highly unlikely but other researchers think it's plausible enough to count as "true enough". Or, in a more extreme case, maybe you know a family secret but you agreed to keep the secret as part of the bargain that let you in on it.

If you understand that social reality is at least partially consensual, you have quite a dilemma. Do you go along with the crowd? Register your objections? Keep your own private notes? Or do you become an evangelist trying to convince everyone else that you alone have The Truth?

I'm partial to the idea expressed above by several others that genealogy (and history) are the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are and what matters about our past.

That suggests to me that when you think someone else's reality is an illusion, one good response is to bargain for a new agreement. If you can't get that, you might have to go along with the crowd for now.

That's been my usual response to problems I find on Geni. If I find real evidence, I put it out in the world -- unless I'm sworn to secrecy, either by family members or by being privileged to get pre-publication copies of new papers. But, if it's just my skepticism against a group of people who disagree I'd rather go along with the crowd for now. If it matters enough to me, I'll put some effort into finding evidence.

Erica, thanks for your information that one's own timeline tab is private to one's family. Anne, I see that you want to read the story on my timeline and look at the two related photos. Since Geni does not allow you to see these items please send me an e-mail at heritage1@magma.ca and I will respond with both the story and the photos. I look forward to hearing from you and wonder if the maple carving which I presented to Elder Secataro in 2007 made its way to the museum where you volunteer.

Justin, the "bargain" as you describe it seems to be the end result of a negotiation. You point out that "our culture tends to define family by biological relationships rather than social relationships" and you follow with some good points about priority setting which show an understanding of the severe limitations of Geni, however wonderful, complex and powerful it is. Indeed, for a global Big Tree what is meant by OUR culture"?

In my culture, which has strong relationships with Indigenous social relationships, I am much influenced by the Indigenous belief that we are not only related to each other in family and in social relationships, but we are related (and with much gratitude) to all nature. The concept flies in the face of cultures which see nature as something to be dominated. The Indigenous concept is embraced in the word "Ginawaydaganuc" which you can find online. One of my mentors, Elder William Commanda, used to say "Ginawaydaganuc" at the parting of two people who have been visiting. That tradition has been picked up by others. See the end of the article at http://www.ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/william-commanda-foot...

I ended yesterday's post to Erica with the words, "Go find Waldo". I used that language because of the challenge genealogists face in finding an ancestor who has eluded our research just as Waldo is "Hidden" in large crowds of people in the book "Where's Waldo?". The next time you are frustrated with fruitless attempts to find your target ancestor, instead of contemplating the formation of an illusory ancestor or bending to the temptation of accepting a "SmartMatch" that is not smart at all because it has false data, try looking at one of the images of Waldo in a crowd. Doing so may let you change your mood from frustration to amusement. For Waldo images see https://www.google.ca/search?q=Find+Waldo+definition&espv=2&amp...

William Arthur Allen

> I am much influenced by the Indigenous belief that we are not only related to each other in family and in social relationships, but we are related (and with much gratitude) to all nature

The Lakota have the same idea. They say "Mitakuye Oyasin" -- We are all related. This is a ritual phrase, used in ceremonies and prayers to remind us about the interconnectedness of all life and all of nature. I've known quite a few Anglos who use it as part of their New Age spirituality, but of course that's a misappropriation of Lakota culture. People should be using the corresponding phrase from their own culture.

It seems to me that when people are doing genealogy they're often looking for evidence of that kind of broad connection. I sometimes wonder if that might be why so many people want to push back to "Adam and Eve". If they could actually prove it that would make them cousins to everyone on earth.

But then, maybe that's not the motivation. Certainly there are quite a few genealogists I know who like to draw very strong lines between who's a relative and who isn't. Somewhere today on another thread I saw I brief exchange about calling people cousins when the relationship is so distant that it might not justify the label. Some people like it. Others don't.

That started me thinking (again) about the different ways people approach the ideas of inclusion and exclusion. Personally, I use relationship terms that aren't technically correct for quite a few "shirt tail" relatives. For example, I call the half-sisters of my half-brother my sisters, even though technically they were never even my step-sisters. An inclusionary style. Some of the other curators think that's just wrong and stupid. An exclusionary style.

I imagine there's a relationship between my inclusionary style and the bit of Lakota cultural influence in my background. For Lakotas, it's a sign of respect and good manners to use kinship terms like "Grandfather", "Grandmother", "Cousin", etc. for people outside the family. And on top of that, as the family genealogist, my Lakota cousins call me Otakuye Ota ("Many Cousins" or "Plenty Relations").

It's not just styles of inclusion and exclusion that are different between Lakota and Anglo cultures. The nature of genealogy is also different. One of my Lakota cousins is a 38th generation medicine man. Putting that in terms of European history that would mean his line goes back to about the time of Charlemagne, long before the Lakotas moved out onto the Great Plains. Using European-style genealogical methods I can trace the line back four or five generations, to about the time of first contact. I don't doubt that he knows generations behind that, but the whole style of retained genealogical knowledge is different. No dates, no places, and because the naming system is so different even the names won't be as prominent as the fact of each person being a link in the chain of generations.

Justin, you say "Somewhere today on another thread I saw I brief exchange about calling people cousins when the relationship is so distant that it might not justify the label. Some people like it. Others don't."

The "cousin" exchange which you saw likely was the one between Alex Moes and me as a followup to dialogue about Merwig I, King of the Thüringians, a person from antiquity which you, as Curator, describe as "probably fictitious".

Merwig 1 was a reference in my initial introduction to the Project "Geni as Illusion?" at http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-as-Illusion/30589

Geni liberally uses the word "cousin" but, despite that and as you point out some people like the cousin label and some people do not. Alex Moes made some helpful comments which I will leave for him to share more widely within our current discussion if he so chooses.

I would like to revisit the comment made by Sharon Lee Doubel on December 22...... "the delusions about the reality of what it is crowd sourcing data is actually doing, that so many people manage to maintain (half the Curators on Geni included)"

I think the use of the word "delusion" is helpful in our discussion. "Illusion" can be defined as an idea which is false, misleading or overly optimistic. "Delusion" can be defined as a false belief, especially when persistent. Are half of Geni's Curators delusional? If so, what kind of World Family Tree is being built?

There's a lot we could say on this topic. One thing we should say at the beginning is that the single biggest barrier to an historically accurate tree is sheer volume.

New users come in, then add lines that are already here. Other users merge those new profiles, but often aren't aware that the new user has introduced errors.

As one of the curators working in the early medieval period, I used to spend 4 to 5 hours a day cleaning up the same lines, over and over and over again.

Using Merwig as an example, it seems easy and obvious that the solution is disconnect his "granddaughter" Basina from her fictitious father Weldelphus. That would help isolate Weldelphus' father Merwig. So easy and obvious that many users are annoyed it "hasn't already been done".

But it's more difficult than it seems. I could disconnect Basina's parents today, and then I'd have to do it again next week, and the week after that, and the week after that, forever, because new merges would keep restoring the relationship. And, if Basina had no parents there are many users who see parents in Internet sources and, being helpful, add them to Geni.

There are hundreds of these fake lines on Geni. Multiply the problem I've just described by all those hundreds, and you'll get an idea of the magnitude of the problem.

Then add the problem that in many cases there is a dispute about whether one or two of the connecting generations these fake lines is real or fake. And add the problem that cutting a connection that far back in the tree will almost always elicit an angry or questioning message from someone who thinks the line is real.

In short, these ancient lines are very high maintenance. They require the active involvement of users who don't mind making the same fixes over and over and over.

When Geni gave curators the ability to lock data fields, the area became much more stable. It takes time to document and lock fields on thousands of profiles, so that work is still going on. When Geni gives curators the ability to lock relationships (which should be soon), we'll see another major advance in stability.

What I could add to the topic re: crowd sourcing.

I spend most of my curating time at another area with many mistakes - the colonization of what became the United States.

Here i see it as almost a matter of the resource data. For example Mayflower 1620 passenger descent / origins is well documented & published ... If you've bought the books / CD's.

So Geni was populated using the freely available databases and GED files. And some of that is wishful thinking, speculation, research ideas, and disproven in 1928, but source data based on public domain 1865 ...

We do, as a generality, get less (emotional) resistance to tree corrections & capping off "this is all we know" than those working on nobility & medieval lines, I believe (but the grander the supposed connection, the more the resistance .... ) :)

But the volume of activity in these areas makes it difficult to keep up.

Building on what Erica is saying, it might be interesting to think about some of the history of "doing genealogy"

The idea of genealogy as something common people can do started in New England in the early 1800s. Before that, it was the occasional project of locally prominent families in Europe and America who wanted to preserve their history.

The original impetus was an anti-immigrant sentiment. People wanted to emphasize that they were the "real Americans", with roots going back to the beginning as opposed to all these new immigrants who were destroying the American way of life.

The American South continued to follow a European model, where genealogy was only for prominent families. So, where New Englanders were organizing and sharing genealogical information Southerners in general continued to preserve the information privately. That's one reason why so much was lost when southern court houses were burned during the Civil War -- Southerners hadn't been researching, sharing, and publishing the same way Northerners had.

What this means for Colonial American research is that many lines that can be known from sources have been known for 100 years or more. If you can get a line back to the early-1800s you have a good chance of connecting to someone else's research.

Even so, fake lines are common. They come mostly from the imaginative work of genealogists working in the late 1800s and early 1900s who wanted to connect their humble lines to grand families in Europe.

Bottom line, American colonial research has been organized and focused for more than 100 years. The fakes are relatively easy to identify from widely available, published sources. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it's an entirely different research landscape than medieval research.

Great point about the private / family records nature of the "southern aristocracy" versus the Family Associations of New England.

Still learning how to identify the fakes! :)

And yes, this has to be a different challenge from Descent from Antiquity, which surely must be driven by information gleaned from a wide variety of historic studies? (anthropology, archeology, linguistics, even geology ... )

Genealogy research in Europe has a very different history. Until the late 1800s and early 1900s it was almost exclusively something for royal, noble, and locally prominent families.

In America genealogy for the masses became popular because of anti-immigrant sentiment, but in Europe it became popular because of Marxism and the workers' movements.

There was an increasing sense that history is not just lists of monarchs and their wars but that the common people can also have a history worth knowing (and that their collective history might actually be more important).

If there are fewer fake lines overall in European genealogy it's primarily because in general there hasn't been the same opportunity (or drive) to connect humble families to famous ancestors.

However, once we get back to medieval and ancient lines that whole research landscape changes.

Monks in the period of early Christianization invented genealogies taking the lines of kings back to Adam. If the kings were no longer descended from the indigenous gods, then they must be somehow descendants of figures from the Bible, from Troy, and from Rome.

Then, starting in the 1200s and reaching a peak in the 1600s, royal propagandists were competing to collect every old tradition and invent new ones if necessary to enhance the prestige of royal and noble families.

The French kings, for example, produced the Grandes Chroniques de France that claimed to show they were the heirs of a small band of Trojan refugees who established the Frankish people.

Not to be outdone, Habsburgs followed a conscious policy for centuries of creating propaganda to show they were the heirs of the Trojan hero Aeneas through Julius Caesar.

The idea that Julius Caesar was descended from Aeneas is just a much earlier, Roman example of the same king of propaganda.

(One of my favorite books is Marie Tanner's The Last Descendant of Aeneas (1993). It shows how genealogical fiction was just one, minor part of the whole Habsburg propaganda effort.)

Sorting through all these old fakes is very different than trying to trace an American family through the censuses. It's easy for someone who has never really studied the period to think that maybe there were records that are now lost.

In some cases that could be true but it's not really plausible, for example, that the French in the 1500s had records going back 2700 years to the Fall of Troy and that the whole record survived in just one magical copy that happens to have been written at a time when genealogical invention was common.

And, it's not really plausible to think the Habsburgs were descended from Julius Caesar when their earliest genealogies show a much humbler ancestry. And, after the first became Emperors it took them 100 years of creating different versions before they hit on one they liked.

In the end it's not really a surprise that so many people have a hard time evaluating the evidence for these very old lines, or that they copy the same mistakes over and over.

Oooh! And I now get to reference my own hobby horse, the Welsh! Which I shall! Because it is a special Baking Day and I have a little break while the pie cooks.

by the late middle ages, the bards were expected to produce genealogic poems for christenings and funerals and the like. And the point of these poems was to announce the lineage of the patron, back into some important guy, even if it took some generations, and also to tie the lineage into important battles and feuds.

But these poems don't necessarily match up across the country.

The genealogies that started really getting produced, starting in the 17th century and then hitting great strides in the 18th and 19th, reproduced these contradictory lines AND didn't give dates AND spelled things in various ways that are often headache inducing.

Genealogical information shows up in the court rolls that deal with property -- yay! -- and also occasionally in the court rolls that deal with crime. But most of the medieval Welsh info is inherited from the poets and the chroniclers.

The manuscripts (here's a list of the ones in the National Library of Wales that are now on microfilm -- http://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/National_Library_of_Wales_Man...) -- got transcribed and printed.

So the contradictions in the originals are reproduced -- you find them in web trees across the internet, and in many printed books -- AND transcription issues then get introduced, because reading and transcribing manuscripts is an art that has undergone many different incarnations (this used to be one of the things I did as a researcher). AND then the scholars and genealogists try to make sense of the contradictory pedigrees.

So that, for instance, a piece of a published transcription of a manuscript, depending on who transcribed it and/or translated it, will be confusingly presented in its structure, will contain transcriptions of the Latin or Welsh abbreviations (which will then get wrongly interpreted, sometimes), and really, sometimes I think it is all just a Hot Mess.

So it's no wonder that the Geni trees contain various lines that get conflated and mixed up with each other; there are innumerable places for misreadings and misinterpretations to come in, and that's before you get to trying to figure out which of the scholars is making the best argument. That's assuming you have a basic understanding of the Welsh naming system, and aren't introducing your own mistakes because you are trying to make sense of a thing which makes no sense to you, it being so alien to an English based system.

Yep. My current hobby horse.

There is a suggestion which comes up now and again that Geni should draw a line in the sand, "Beyond this point be dragons!", that genealogy (in the anglo sense as originally envisioned by Geni and it's ilk) should be limited to a specific date in history forward.

Where the line should be obviously varies enormously between cultures and would be very subjective, but the main problem i suspect is that it would have a very negative affect on revenue to simply severe the top "half" of the tree.
Sorry to bring up such a base commercial idea on today of all days.

Clearly, however, there is a point in all cultures where it requires, if not formal training at least a sound understanding of the broader context and the further back into the mist you go the more knowledge is required.

Erica, how is geology used in genealogy? I would be very interested to hear you expand on this suggestion.

I don't know that geology "is" used in "traditional" genealogy, which is the recitation of pedigrees. But of course it's vastly important to population movements. An old saw: there really was a flood around Noah's time, and what the earth tells us can help date the events of the Bible.

Rather than limit a "world family tree" in a sense I'd like to see it open up, the example of native cultures genealogy as a case in point. I don't know how to chart it (yet) and that's all that Geni is: the Pictograph of the family story. To chart it, we have to ask ourselves : what is a source? The better answers for the fact inclined come from science ....