Can you trust other people's family trees and Ancestry hints?

No, not as proof. Another person's tree, and any hint built from one, is a lead. It shows where someone else ended up, not whether they were right. A hint that points to an actual record is worth opening. Nothing goes into your tree until you have read that record yourself and it names your person.

The highest-voted thread I found on r/Genealogy was a public service announcement for new genealogists whose title tells them not to trust any information in other people's family trees. The rest of this post is the why, the how, and one real profile I corrected.

Why are so many online trees wrong?

Because copying is free and checking is work. On Ancestry, a hint is the green leaf next to a person in your tree. Some hints come from another member's tree, and accepting one copies that member's names and dates into yours in a click. After a few rounds of this, one guess sits in hundreds of trees. A hundred copies of a guess are still one guess.

The second cause is the namesake. Two men with the same name in the same county get merged into one, and the merged man ends up with children born years after his burial. The third is the famous ancestor: somewhere up the line a tree jumps from a farmer with no documents to a nobleman with a biography. Family Tree Resources' piece on how far back family trees go says of the extreme case that pedigrees reaching Adam and Eve generally have no real proof of where their information came from. A 1500s lord reached through one undocumented jump is the same problem in a smaller dose; more on that in whether you're really descended from royalty.

The Ancestor Hunt's questions to ask before accepting an online tree is a good filter: records cited, or only other trees; dates that line up; people duplicated from other trees; a famous ancestor with nothing underneath. Ancestry's own help page on keeping a tree accurate says the quiet part: it is a lot easier to research fully before adding to your tree than to remove a bunch of people who were added wrongly. Most of the mistakes beginners describe are that sentence, lived.

Are Ancestry hints accurate?

It depends on which kind. Ancestry's help center says hints are made by automatically comparing your tree against popular records, photos and other members' trees. Three different things wear that leaf.

• Record hints point to a document: a census page, a birth, marriage or death record. Open these every time. One genealogist who used to work at Ancestry writes that hints come from a limited set of the site's collections. Her rule is to take them as clues, not hit accept on everything.
• Member tree hints point to another person's tree. They are someone's conclusion, not a record. Her practice is mine: look, take notes if something seems promising, and don't accept or attach.
• Potential mother and father hints are a step further removed. Ancestry defines a potential parent as a hint or collection of hints that point to a certain person and makes no claim about how often they are right. A proposed parent is a hypothesis to test against probate (the court paperwork around a will), deeds, and the census households around the family, not a button to press.

How often is a record hint the right person? The only published count I know of comes from a genealogy blogger who in September 2016 went through 400 record hints on his own Ancestry tree. He reported 347 for the specific person, 39 not, and 21 maybes: about 87 percent right. That is one tree, ten years ago, record hints only, and your number will differ. The lesson is the 39: roughly one record hint in ten pointed at the wrong person, and the leaf looked identical either way.

How do I check a hint or a tree before I accept it?

The same routine works for both.

1. Open the image, not the index. An index is someone's transcription; the image is the record. Names get mistyped, ages get misread, and the household on the page tells you whether this is your family.
2. Match on more than the name. FamilySearch's beginner's guide to searching records gives the four checks: names, allowing for variants; dates, allowing for small slips; places; and relationships. A name alone is a coincidence waiting to happen; I want three of the four, from records that don't depend on each other.
3. Ask what the tree cites. If the only source is another tree, you have a lead and nothing more. Go find the record the tree should have cited. If it doesn't exist, neither does the fact.
4. Run the timeline. A mother under 15 or over 50 at a birth, a child born years after the father's burial, a marriage two hundred miles from every other event in the family's life: each is a flag.
5. Say no properly. On FamilySearch, a hint that isn't your person gets marked Not a Match with a reason, so the next person sees why. One warning from that page: don't dismiss a duplicate hint for a record you already attached, which makes the hinting worse for that person; attach it instead.

How to tell if a record is really your ancestor goes deeper on same-name cases, where this routine earns its keep.

What counts as proof in genealogy?

Professionals use a five-part test called the Genealogical Proof Standard, published by the Board for Certification of Genealogists. Their standards page lists the parts: reasonably exhaustive research; complete and accurate source citations; thorough analysis and correlation; resolution of conflicting evidence; and a soundly written conclusion. FamilySearch's wiki page on the standard puts the same five in plain sentences. Plainer still: look everywhere a careful person would, write down where every fact came from, compare the records against each other, deal with the ones that disagree, and write the reasoning down so someone else can check it.

A copied tree fails all five at once. Nobody searched, nothing is cited, nothing was compared, conflicts were never noticed, and there is no reasoning to read. A tree with a thousand people and no documents is worth less than a tree with thirty people and a record under each one.

My own file runs on a shorter version: no link, no claim, and every finding labeled by how sure I am, because "proven" and "likely" are different words.

What did the trees get wrong about Padre Ballí?

Padre Island is named for Padre José Nicolás Ballí, the priest who settled it in 1804, and nobody knows when he was born. The state historical marker says sometime in the 1770s, the National Park Service says circa 1768, another marker says 1772, and the statue at the causeway reads "177?". His baptism entry was likely lost when a flood destroyed Reynosa in 1800. That is File 001, my public case, and a clean example of a tree against a register.

What the tree said

His profile on FamilySearch's shared tree carried a birth year with no source behind it and gave April 16, 1829 as his date of death. That is the date every history book prints, so the tree was in good company.

What the register said

In August 2026 I went page by page through the digitized burial register of Nuestra Señora del Refugio in Matamoros and found his original entry, unindexed and uncited in any published source. April 16 turns out to be the day he was buried. An entry five days earlier already calls him el finado, the deceased. The date in the books, and in the tree, was a burial date, copied as a death date for a century and a half by people who never looked at the page.

Two days later, in the Reynosa marriage register, I found his own signature, as interim priest, on marriages he performed in January and February 1807: "Yo el Br. D. Nicolas Bally, Cura interino." He spells his name both Bally and Ballí on the same page, which is why indexes scatter his records. The signature also puts a documented boundary on the birth year: church law set the minimum age for ordination at 24, and here he is, a priest, on a dated page.

What I changed, and what I didn't

On September 1, 2026, I corrected the death date on the FamilySearch profile and attached both sources, the burial register and the 1807 signature. The next person who finds him finds the documents too. No memorial page for him existed on Find a Grave, so I created one, citing the register. The birth year stays an open question in my file. An empty field is better than a confident guess that a hundred trees will copy by next year.

One more thing from that file: the researcher who indexed the Reynosa books told me that the Padre had two brothers, not the three or four some online trees give him. That went into the file as a pointer, not a fact, until I have the baptisms. If the rule doesn't bend for people I trust, it doesn't bend for a stranger's tree.

Should I keep my tree on a shared site like FamilySearch?

Yes, with one adjustment. FamilySearch's Family Tree is one shared tree, so anyone can edit your ancestor, and someone will. Every change is logged. On the person's page, the Latest Changes box shows what changed, by whom, and when; open Show All, find the change, and if Restore appears beside it, you can undo it. Then click the other user's contact name and send a message with the record that proves your version. A document settles it faster than an argument.

The adjustment: keep a private master copy that only you edit, and treat the shared tree as where you publish conclusions and meet cousins. A bad edit then costs you ten minutes, not ten years. An Ancestry member tree is the opposite case: one owner, so your work is safe, and a stranger's wrong tree stays wrong until that stranger fixes it.

If your own tree already carries copied errors, that is common, and the first week of a case is for catching them: the 1800s package includes finding and documenting errors in an existing tree before anything is built on them.

If you'd rather have this done, start with the $300 Discovery assessment; it's credited in full toward any package. You get a brick-wall check and a written research plan before you commit to anything larger. Start with the assessment.