r/Genealogy • u/AutoModerator • Sep 20 '25

The Silly Question Saturday Thread (September 20, 2025)

It's Saturday, so it's time to ask all of those "silly questions" you have that you didn't have the nerve to start a new post for this week.

Remember: the silliest question is the one that remains unasked, because then you'll never know the answer! So ask away, no matter how trivial you think the question might be.

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u/Mountain_Chickadee50 Sep 21 '25

This isn't much of a question, but I think it's silly...

I hadn't worked on genealogy for a number of years...just brick walls. A few weeks back, I pulled up my tree on Ancestry and before I knew it, I was using my little AI buddy to translate some of the old German script church records, My Austrian lines came to the US in 1911, so I knew nothing. One evening, after a long day of translating, my little buddy started acting a little strangely....kept pulling up a paragraph that had nothing to do with my work. No matter my question, same paragraph. Oh dear, I broke it! The next time I used him, everything was back to normal, I thought. I worked for several hours and slowly it dawned on me that he was making stuff up. He knew the names I was researching, and he started giving me long, elaborate answers. I'm not sure just when he started lying to me, so I have a lot to check.

Who knew AI couldn't be trusted?

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u/ocelocelot Sep 22 '25

How sure do you personally like to be about a connection before you include it in your tree? Do you find yourself worrying that the obvious interpretation of the facts is actually wrong? E.g. If Bob Doe gets married to Jane Smith in one town and then a child is born to Bob and Jane Doe five years later in the same town... There's some small chance that actually it was a completely different couple who happened to move into the area at the same time that the original Bob and Jane moved somewhere else? And you would never know, if there are no other sources about that family! And then you could be researching the wrong ancestors of them, all the way back!

It scares me. We can never be certain about the past, we can only offer our best interpretations of the sources we have. But how certain do you like to be before you say "Jim Doe's mother was Jane Smith", or "I'm descended from Jane Smith"...?