Question: Distant family has entered erroneous information about my family. How do I correct these errors?

--Karen S. Nicks

Answer:

That is a great question, Karen. I think we all want the information about our family to be correct, and it can be frustrating to see mistakes made about our family in other members’ family trees.

Before I share my suggestions, I wanted to quickly clarify that on Ancestry.com the owner of a family tree has ultimate responsibility over the information included in their tree. They can invite others to be editors in their tree, but beyond that they are the only ones that can edit their family tree.

That being said, I do have two suggestions of what do to when you find information you feel is incorrect in other members’ family trees.

1. Contact the other member.
Each family tree on Ancestry.com should have the username of the owner listed with it. Clicking that username lets you access their public member profile and contact them directly. Most of us want the information in our family tree to be as correct as possible. Hopefully, contacting the other member about the information you think is incorrect and explaining your sources, etc., will encourage them to make changes to their tree.

It is possible that the other member is no longer actively using Ancestry.com and may not act on your suggestions. If this is the case, you can also add a public comment to the listing of deceased individuals in their public family tree. In this comment you can politely state what information you think is incorrect and why. Not only is this another way to communicate with the owner of the tree, but this would also be visible to others who find the tree.

2. Share your own research.
The best way to make sure that others know the correct information about your family is for you to share your own documented research. If you publicly share a well-sourced family tree, other members will find it when searching for your family. They may find the incorrect information from other members as well, but hopefully they can see from your sources that your information is correct. Over time the hope is that the most correct and well-sourced information spreads and becomes the most common information available about a family.

Thanks for your question and best of luck with your family history research.