and for the downside....

For the second time on FamilySearch the same person has (re)merged my paternal grandfather with his namesake born in the same month and year, despite my collaborative note - which is now yet more detailed as to why NOT to merge them.

They were born a fortnight apart, one registered in Oamaru, the other in Palmerston North, ie separate islands of New Zealand.
The separate NZ Historical BDM index entries show their different parents had been added to a note on each, but that didn't deter this person.
Yes on the surface it looks like the one who married first may have moved islands and remarried but he didn't. He remarried a bit further north.
It doesn't help that the older fiche birth indexes for New Zealand don't make it easy to find them to add the place details to the exact birth dates and parents available from the Historical BDM index online at the Dept of Internal Affairs.
Both are indexed as Archifold Hinderson instead of Archibald Henderson!

This time I've added yet more research into the note on both profiles.
The North Islander has been placed safely up in Te Kuiti with his 2nd wife in the 1919 electoral roll, his father's obit has been added  as well, which places him in Cambridge (Waikato, North Island) whilst my granddad is recorded down in Woodhaugh, Dunedin in 1919 with his first and only wife Agnes later moving to Roxburgh, Otago (South Island).
I do know that he once ventured north, at least as far as Wellington, on his honeymoon, but he did not already have a son by then, at least not Cyril.

I've also sent the chap a message via FamilySearch to PLEASE STOP merging these Archibalds.

WikiTree has also been updated with a disambiguation note on Granddad, with the other chap now also added there, he is after all nearly family - his son married my mother's 2nd cousin!
But there are other things I'd rather have been researching last night in the time spent doing the additional research that should, hopefully STOP the "helpful" person from merging them again.

Thankfully such persistance is rare, and an apology has just been received.

This does not detract from the overall benefit of sharing tree research.
We do not own our ancestors but we do owe it to them to be remembered accurately.

Such trees do tend to get better over time as duplications are reduced, research notes added etc.

Just the other day I was re-examining the scant tree of a DNA match on Ancestry wondering where his missing link to my DAWE family was and this time round, someone had added exactly the link I was missing.
The FamilySearch tree has now been extended to link him back to the rest of his ancestors already there.
This allowed me to breakthrough that mystery and connect in a newfound 3rd cousin thanks to both DNA and the collaborative tree at FamilySearch.

So mark your key people to be "Watched" so you can keep an eye on changes, you never know what you will learn, or who you will "meet" as a result.

Collaborative trees - the upside

Many of you may already have realised I'm a great fan of collaborative trees, WikiTree and FamilySearch in particular.

The downsides (enthusiastic newbies connecting up families with the scantest of evidence, or agin the evidence without a thought) are far far outweighed by the benefits of sharing.

Examples of both hit home strongly last night. (See next post for yesterday's example of the downside.)

For the huge plus side, my weekly Watch list email from FamilySearch highlighted that someone had added both a previously unknown child to the family of my 4x great grandparents Archibald Fairbain and Alison Crosser, and a baptism source for my 3x great grandfather Walter. (FamilySearch / WikiTree)

Which latter in particular is a bit embarrassing.

After all my research into Fairbairns you'd think I'd have gone back and rechecked my early work looking for the gaps that could now be filled.

There he is, baptized just across the border in Norham.
Which fits his 1841 census entry saying he was born in England, even if he did recant on that by 1851.

It's hardly an out of the way place for them to have been.
Courtesy of google we can see that it was 4 miles between Norham and Swinton where by the time the 1851 census came round Walter said he was born, having forgotten that 10 years earlier he'd said "England".

Unfortunately, there appear to only be the two baptisms there, no marriage for Archibald and Alison to fill that record gap, but also none for the presumed eldest son Archibald to contradict that he is the one baptized in Whitsome & Hilton, Berwickshire in 1783. :)
There seems to be only one other Fairbairn baptizing his children around this timeframe (1760 to 1800), a Thomas, with a William and an Ann.

Thank you to the person updating the Fairbairn tree that brought this to my attention.
Updates will ensue on WikiTree (done) and my Webpages
 

How many to go?

As you can probably deduce, I'm a DNA junkie.
Apart from using my autosomal DNA matches (and a lot of genealogical research) to map my chromosomes so that I know (eventually - I hope!) which bits on which chromosomes were inherited from which ancestors*, another of my aims to is document the haplogroups for each of my ancestors out to my 2*great grandparents (at least) -  yDNA and/or mtDNA.

Knowing this data is of help in working with autosomal DNA matches to rule in or out of contention certain lines, and you never do know what else you may learn.

So I thought it was time to take stock.
The above is a screen shot of my ancestry tree pedigree with the symbols I've attached for the appropriate haplogroups where known.

How am I doing?
Grandparents: one to go, George Ernest ANDREWS.
There's a test in progress for a descendant of Simon ANDREWS, due next month.

Great Grandparents: two to go, other than George Gibson ANDREWS who will be sorted next month.
Helen Sinton WIGHT (WorldConnect / WikiTree / Geni / FamilySearch) and
Ellen TURNBULL (WorldConnect / WikiTree / Geni / FamilySearch.

Can you help?
Concentrating on Helen Sinton WIGHT first.
Helen Sinton WIGHT has no living descendants who inherited her mitochondrial DNA.
Working back to her mother, Helen WIGHT nee SINTON (my webpages / WorldConnect / WikiTree) there may be some options, but although (or because) this WIGHT family is the one that started my whole genealogy journey back in the 1970s, it is the least documented, and very poorly sourced given how new I was to this back then! 

Can YOU help by contributing any knowledge you have on descendants of Helen?
The three main collaborative world trees that anyone can access for free, that I follow and work with are: WikiTree, Geni and FamilySearch.
Let's see if we can turn up any living descendants down any of the lines in general, hopefully at least one in particular that carries Helen's mitochondrial DNA AND one who may be convinced to indulge my curiousity.

Both WikiTree and Geni have DNA related tools that can be quickly checked for DNA candidates of interest - and easily rechecked as the tree grows:
WikiTree -  descendants of Helen who have inherited her mtDNA a short list - but I am working on an update as we speak. None on the current list are still with us, and the first two branches I've worked on don't appear to have any likely surviving candidates for mtDNA.
Geni - living descendants of Helen who have inherited her mtDNA (none as at Jul 2016)
FamilySearch - descendants of Helen WIGHT nee SINTON

Regardless of this specific quest for mitochondrial DNA candidates, there may well be some cousins still around who would be most welcome to contribute autosomal DNA and see what that adds to our overall DNA knowledge of connections.
Pop along to my atDNA project FFLornaHen on FamilyTreeDNA and order a FamilyFinder test, or test at Ancestry and then transfer that file to both GEDMatch.comhttp://GEDMatch.com and to FamilyTreeDNA so we can all fish in both ponds for matches and use the tools only available on the latter two sites to make the most of our investment(s).
I'd love to hear from any of you - contact form on most of my webpages.

* the main aim of all that work with my atDNA is to concentrate on the matches at the spots where I don't yet know which ancestor is to blame - can you hear the sounds of the crumbling brickwalls?
A wonderful side effect is of course confirming the family tree, testing theories, and as recently highlighted, finding new siblings for some of the ancestors.
Some of the distant cousins you get to "meet" may even be able to shed more light on our shared ancestors with photos, family knowledge etc.

Twenty years is too long

I spend rather too long on trying to join dots on long dead, distant relatives at the expense of maintaining contact with the living.
I was forcibly reminded of this the other day when I finally figured out a long time puzzle in the family tree and went to share it with a descendant of John BAIN and Sinclair MANSON whom I knew would be interested *.
Too late. She had died in the too long an interval since we'd been in contact, which I was rather shocked to note was 20 years ago.
That did lead me into an, ongoing, update on the more modern branches of my BAIN relatives in New Zealand.
Two others lost in the interim (so far), but I did also re-connect with the last surviving representative of her generation - great to catch up, and to get another representative down from Donald BAIN and Maggie TAYLOR into the DNA tested category for posterity and future research into our Caithness inter-connections.
If interested in exploring your genetic connections, do consider a FamilyFinder test from FamilyTreeDNA, and if a descendant of Donald and Maggie, the autosomal DNA project FFLornaHen would love to hear from you.

* For anyone else who may be interested in the ancestry of John WARES, whose death index/certificate I'd not found all those years ago - the phrase in probate records "who died on or about (insert date here)", covers a multitude of sins, but I'd never found one two years out before.
In years past I'd given up looking through the fiche index for the matching death.
Now, we can simply click on a website.
There he was, right day and month, two years later than the probate stated he had died (yes it was a probate well after the event).
Turns out that his parents were John WARES and Janet BAIN in Staxigoe, Wick, Caithness.
FamilySearch tree has been updated to connect him to his parents, my WorldConnect Database LornaHenderson will be updated shortly.
No known connection, yet, between his mother Janet BAIN and his wife Jamesina BAIN's families.

FamilySearch

Although I am not a Mormon, I have many, daily, reasons to be thankful for their diligence in preserving  genealogical records.
Every so often I fossick around and add sources to the growing tree that I've started there.
A find yesterday was a previously unknown to me daughter in the family of Stephen GRAHAM and Jane BATY.
Poor mite died shortly after birth but the addition of a Sarah into the family reinforces the identification of Jane's parents as William & Sarah BATY of Hornick Hill over the Slealands Jane to William & Mary.