What is your biggest genealogy pet peeve?

People who put up wrong information on a website. I learned this the hard way. I thought I'd finally traced one of my lines to early 1800's/late 1700s but I soon discovered that something the person put in their tree was wrong and I had to scrap the whole thing. And my other pet peeve is the same as yours-name variations!

I have two pet peeves with this. One is the census people and how they misspell a name, both first and last. How they will not be accurate from one year to the next to the ages of people, and the ever favorite how many children there are. My other pet peeve is about the lovely ancestors who changed names, made up histories, or just vanished. You know they are somewhere but you sure can't find them anyplace. We've run into some problems tracing my mother's family. It's made us want to pull our hair out a few times. We are making headway just slowly.

My biggest pet peeve is, people who has the information I could use and are not willing to share it with me. Another is paysites, I think genealogy information should be free. And of course the brick wall I run into and think this person must have just landed here from outer space.

Ohhh, let's see. I think my biggest pet peeve is people on the internet who make claims that so and so is the father/sister/brother/child/spouse of such and such and offer absolutely no documentation. Now if it's just a couple of generations back that's one thing but when it gets to the point where you're several generations back that's making a big presumption! If I have no documentation, I make notes in my records that I *think* so and so is the father/sister/brother etc of a person. At least that way someone else understands that my information may or may not be true. Also, the ancestors who were either dropped off by an alien space ship or were picked up by one get to me, too. ;)

There are so many! One is, people who email you and ask for all the family information you have. I am happy to share my information, but please, don't demand it from me. Your two peeves are common complaints from all of us doing family research. In a way, and you may disagree, that is part of the "fun" of doing genealogy. Truthfully, I have had more good experiences, and found hundreds of cousins, doing genealogy than I ever thought possible. One thing that I ran into that truly irked me was someone who posted online that my Osgathorpe family was really related to the Oglethorpe family. NOT true! People who try to re-write history without any documentation are jerks. IMHO

I have a huge database of information. I have been researching for many, many years. So when I sit back and think about it...my pet peeves are: 1. Information with no citations (documentation) or with citations that can not be verified. I should be able to follow your footsteps that you took to find the information the first time. 2. People who get information from me, then claim that they did the work and do not properly cite me as their source. Give credit where credit is due. When I spend 8 years trying to find out a well hidden piece of information and then some newbie claims they found it but forgets to say they got the information from me...yes, i get upset. 3. I agree with one of the other postings. If you are not sure of something, flag it! mark it! but some how let others clearly know that the information is not verified and could very well be wrong or correctable through more research. Ok, i think i am done sounding off on this issue. thank you for asking the question.

One of my pet peeves are the early Census records that only recorded the name of head of household. Having just the ages of the rest of the household really doesn't help me verify that I have the correct family. boo hoo Another one, I agree with those of you that are bugged by people that will not share information. That's nuts. A few years back, I discovered a cousin [so many times removed :) ]that I didn't know about. Since meeting her on-line, we have both made huge progress on our mutual family line. That progress was made only because we have continued to share all information we find. Cathy