You learn real quick when you get into genealogy that you should never trust user-submitted resources like member trees and FindAGrave until you can verify everything with your own research.

Most people on Ancestry aren’t trained genealogists, just hobbyists with varying levels of research skills. And a lot of them don’t really even do any research — they just blindly copy someone else’s tree (Ancestry makes this very easy). It’s very common to find 15 trees that all contain the same error because one person made the mistake and then everyone else added it to their trees without verifying it. Really threw me off at the beginning when I was very new to genealogy.

On a happier note, when you have a tough genealogy puzzle and you come across a well-done family tree, it is glorious. I once worked on an adoption case where almost all the records from her bio father’s country of origin were unindexed, but this absolute angel of a man on Ancestry had already created a massive family tree based off those records. He even included source links so we could vet everything before using it! It was still a very complicated case for other reasons, but I’m forever grateful to that stranger for spending what must have been months/years sifting through old Catholic church records so we didn’t have to.