I've been doing Buckner genealogy for probably 30 years now, and the biggest problem I've always faced is that one Buckner line from Virginia was fully of wealthy, prominent people who paid lots of money for "genealogists" to research their glorious family history. Of course, they got shucked like oysters by a whole series of hucksters, Gustave Anjou being the most notable, and the result is that there are several books out there full of just fake nonsense "genealogy." This has always been, to choose a legal analogy, an "attractive nuisance," since anybody who has the last name Buckner tends to want to hook up with these artfully crafted fairy tales. Inevitably with the advent of internet genealogy, all of this stuff has been copied endlessly into Ancestry.com, FindAGrave, the IGI, WFT, and naturally here. I've been whacking away at the weeds on WikiTree for about a month, but there are a couple sections of trees on here where I don't have just a couple mistakes, but there are whole bogus lines, like many generations of people who are either totally nonexistant or so distorted that it's impossible to figure out what real person they were actually based on.
So here's the question - according to proper WikiTree practice, what am I supposed to do with, say, 3 or 4 generations of fake covering a couple dozen profiles? Not like, "the birthdate is wrong" but the name is wrong, the birthdate is fake, the middle name is fake, the children are fake or wrong, the parents are wrong, the death date is fake, the marriage date is fake, ... (Source BobsFamilyTree.GED from Ancestry.com, Meaningless Code #S35-SFS33D-SFDS32342342)
- A - Just separate the profiles and attempt to guess at good places to merge them?
- B - Just leave it and put in the comments that the source the profiles are based on is seriously erroneous and/or forged data?
- C - Separate the profiles and recycle them individually for real people of the same name, roughly contemporary, who don't have profiles
I tend to prefer C because people have snapped at me for bothering them with merge requests, and frankly I don't see the point in merging some junk profile into a good profile, but I haven't really gotten a sense for what the WT community considers the best practice for that kind of thing.
Regards,
Ben Buckner