This week's blog prompt presented by Amy Johnson Crow, 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, is "All Mixed Up." We're to blog on which ancestors get confused with other people. I have a good case, and I have to be blunt and charge FamilySearch.org for being a big cause of this mixup.
My mother was an intra-family adoption. Her birth parents were Benjamin Franklin "Frank" Reed (1888-1917) and Ruth Nave (1892-1951). Frank Reed was killed in a railroad accident when my mother was not quite one year old. The Reeds had issues with Ruth Nave, and in the words of my mother's birth sister, my aunt Margaret, they "ganged up on her" and took my mother and aunt Margaret away from her and had two of Frank's brothers and their wives adopt the girls. Their brother, my Uncle Don, the oldest of the three, stayed with his mother, as he was 16 years old.
My mother was adopted by her uncle Perry Wilmer Reed (1885-1937) and his wife Mary LeSourd (a variant spelling) (1889-1978). And here's where the mixup begins. Many people have posted to the tree on FamilySearch that Perry and Mary Reed were my mother's actual parents. This is wrong, and I have mom's birth certificate citing Frank and Ruth Reed as her birth parents, and a copy of the final adoption decree recording mom's adoption by Perry and Mary Reed.
I have tried numerous times to correct this. I put the correct information with source citations on the FamilySearch tree, and come back only to find that someone has replaced my correct information with the incorrect attribution of my mother's parentage to Perry and Mary Reed, usually without source citations.
I have given up on that FamilySearch tree because I am just mortally tired of correcting misinformation and providing source citations, only to find that someone has put back the wrong information. I love FamilySearch for the access to documents, and for their wonderful and very instructive wiki. In those two aspects, it is a fount of information par excellence.
But don't even try to induce me to go back to using their tree. I'm done with it.
However, I'm not totally down on collaboration. I am a user of WikiTree, mostly because they do require, encourage, and endorse good source citations on their tree. But even at that, when I get notices of all sorts of famous people I may be descended from, some of them trace through Perry and Mary Reed rather than my mother's actual parents, Frank and Ruth Reed.
In the background, for those of you who are Star Wars fans, I hear the voice of Admiral Akbar.
"It's a trap!"
