Are you barking up the wrong family tree?

As you begin to work on investigating your ancestry, you will eventually find it necessary to organize the information in the form of a "family tree." There are a number of variations on the concept of a pedigree chart but all the available online or desktop programs produce a chart that shows your parents, your grandparents, and etc. The idea is that the lines between the individuals represent a family relationship. Here is an example of a family tree representation from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree website.

Once the information that you enter into any one of these programs is codified into a pedigree chart, it becomes almost "set in concrete." Here is the same information in another form of pedigree chart commonly called a fan chart.

This kind of representation of a family is very persuasive. Because of our innate desire to see new horizons, we are almost compelled to run out to the end of our individual family lines and start looking for more information, i.e. adding new and more family lines. The fan chart above is an example of an important principle of genealogical research: each generation back in time of your ancestors geometrically increases the number of your family lines. This increase is not uniform however because of a principle called "pedigree collapse" that occurs when people marry their relatives. Since pedigree collapse is well documented, why does the fan chart seem to expand forever?

The concept of pedigree collapse is difficult to represent in either a standard pedigree chart or a fan chart format. Computer programs have only recently been able to work through family tree information and show familial relationships between any two individuals. For example, Relative Finder is a program that uses the FamilySearch.org Family Tree to find connections between any two people in the Family Tree. If I use the program to search for a connection between me and my wife, I find that I am related to my wife's mother as a 7th cousin, 1 time removed.

Pedigree charts do not show that kind of relationship. But there is an even more serious issue with pedigree charts (including especially fan charts). The main issue is that the information entered into the pedigree may not support the connections. Here is how Relative Finder shows I am related to my wife's mother. The entire chart is too large to fit on one screen so I am showing only the portion indicating the common ancestor.

Here is the problem. This supposed connection goes back through my Morgan line. The connection between Garrard Morgan (b. 1755, d. 1786) and the person listed as his father, John Morgan (b. 1734, d. 1765) is entirely undocumented. There are no listed sources documenting this relationship. In addition, the information about Jacob Morgan (b. 1700, died no date), his father, is entirely fabricated. The place listed for Jacob Morgan's birth did not exist in 1700 when he was supposedly born.

So here we have two issues: pedigree collapse and unsupported ancestral lines that contribute to forms of pedigree charts that cannot correctly show relationships.

If I were to "jump back" and start doing research on Richard Morgan, I would soon find that there is nothing supporting the claim of his relationship to my family line. There are two generations of Morgans that lack documentation. In fact, Morgan is an extremely common surname originating primarily in Wales.

Every pedigree line, including all those on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, either end with a blank or continue with rank speculation with no supporting documentation. Now, if you look at each of your family lines, how many of them actually end before the names run out? Research on these lines needs to focus on the parents of the last verified entry in each line. Meanwhile, don't take calculated relationships seriously unless each person in the family line has been adequately verified.