Online Family Trees--A Cautionary Tale

Heinrich (Henry, Sr.) Josef Sommer's
1859 Badischer passport

I was searching a favorite genealogy site recently for the whereabouts of my great aunt, Martha Washington Sommer, and her husband and son (both named Elwood Conrad Jones) in 1920.

Mother told stories about her eccentric aunt, who briefly practiced dentistry in Philadelphia, before her marriage to the unfortunate Elwood, Sr. In 1920, Martha and Elwood had been married an unlucky 13 years, and they seem to have dropped off the face of the earth. This could be because they were off chasing a cure for Elwood, who by 1930 had been diagnosed with "psychosis with psychotic episodes" and institutionalized at the Brattleboro (Vermont) Retreat where he remained until his death in 1946.


The search wasn't going well, and then, among the results, the couple appeared in an online family tree. I generally have little faith in online family trees, but as nothing else was turning up, I decided to give this one a look. What I found only deepened my skepticism toward these trees: Martha, her parents (my great-grandparents), Henry Joseph and Mary Catherine [Ruhl] Sommer, and Martha's siblings had been, for lack of a better word, usurped by a tree owner calling himself "Rocketboy". Rocketboy had an ancestor named Henry R. Sommers, b. 1871 in Pennsylvania, the son of Malachi Sommers and his wife, Susanna. My grandfather was Henry J. Sommer, b. 1871 in Pennsylvania, the son of Henry, Sr. and Mary. Rocketboy saw my Henry in the 1880 U.S. census of Quakertown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and thought he'd found his.

Henry Joseph Sommer, Jr.,
mistaken for Henry R. Sommers

Initially, Rocketboy made an honest mistake in his eagerness to locate an ancestor, but then he did something dishonest: He created alternative facts to turn my family into his.  The 1880 U.S. census was the first to make clear how each person in a household related to the household head. The Henry in this census was, without question, the son of Henry, Sr. and Mary, not of Malachi and Susanna. So when Rocketboy created his online tree, he added "aka Henry" after Malachi's name, and "aka Mary" after Susanna's.

I was really annoyed to find  my grandfather Sommer's family group had been shanghaied into someone else's family line. I've spent years researching this interesting group of people, verifying Mother's stories, and using a number of original documents, such as Great-grandfather's 1859 passport to America issued by the Duchy of Baden, to trace the chronology of their lives. I know these people as well as someone who never met them could, and I feel a strong bond with each of them; they are MY people.

Rocketboy didn't go beyond the federal censuses to document his discovery. He relied solely on the 1880 U.S. census to merge his Henry into mine, and then used the 1900, and 1910 censuses of my great-grandparents' household in Quakertown to further establish his own ancestor in time and place. Many people don't offer any documentation at all for the claims made in their family tree, so I guess I should give Rocketboy a bit of credit for making an effort to provide some kind of "evidence".

Any online tree that offers no documentation, or that relies only on census data, needs to be taken with a big grain of salt. The problem with using only census information is that the census taker generally gathered a family's data from whomever answered the door, so he might have spoken with a forgetful mother-in-law, or a maid with a limited command of English. In a few cases, when no one was home, the next door neighbor might be enlisted to answer questions. A census can validate some family claims or even offer new insights, but it doesn't prove someone's age, place of birth, or even their correct name. Genealogical proof comes only from these documents: birth records, marriage records, death records (although the value of this record depends on how well the information-provider knew the deceased), wills, land records.

To Rocketboy's credit, when I contacted him about the merger of his Henry R. with my Henry J., and offered to provide him with my documentation, he admitted his error, and unmerged the Henries.