Don’t Play the Name Game

Editors’ Note: Guest author Nick Rowland implores you not to play the genealogy name game. Instead, base your family tree on solid research, confirmed with DNA testing.

I have been reading Ron Rowland’s excellent article about the Rowland Haplotree¹. If you haven’t already read it, please do as it is an excellent representation of how we all relate to each other going back to ancient times.  This started me thinking about how we all end up with the same or similar surnames even though we may only be distantly related and, even then, way back before surnames were a thing. For example, Rowland DNA Group H and DNA Group M appeared to be unrelated during written history but they share a common Neolithic ancestor who lived about 5000 years ago and resided somewhere in North East Europe.

Surname choice seems to have been a random affair, certainly in England. They could be occupational such as Smith, Baker, Thatcher, etc., they could be location-based such as Dell, River, Forest, Marsh, etc., or settlement based such as York, London, Aston, Norwich, etc., and other options are almost endless. Apparently over half of English surnames are based on where people lived, which is interesting.

Do Your Research

This leads me to the purpose of this article which is to implore people to research their genealogy based on solid documentary sources and then think carefully about whether documents fit where people lived and check if the dates are genuinely logical. Too many times I have come across Family Trees that are completely wrong, because, for example, in a family tree someone has assumed John Rowland born in York, England 1671 is the same John Rowland who died in Dorset, England in 1735. Unless there was genuine documentary evidence to prove John had really moved from York to Dorset this is highly likely to be an incorrect link and two separate families have now become conflated. I call this playing the name game. Just because the name is the same does not mean it is the same person! At that time Dorset was a long way from York and it might have taken days to get there. Ordinary people didn’t move about much until the Industrial Revolution started.

As you can see from Ron’s Rowland Haplotree most of the Rowland families in the project are quite unrelated during the period where documents exist, it is very unlikely they share Rowland tree data in the last 1000 years.

I have come across this problem so often that I now avoid using someone else’s research unless it is well-supported with valid sources. It only takes one person to make an error in a tree for that error to propagate into multiple other trees because subsequent researchers have chosen to lift the erroneous tree and add it to theirs.

The FamilySearch website seems to be one of the worst offenders for having muddled family trees and this is often because someone else can alter your tree with their data. This happened to my tree on FamilySearch, whereby my grandfather who was born and died in Woodbridge, Suffolk, England (Yes, I can prove this multiple ways!) suddenly appears to have died in Woodbridge, Virginia, USA! Just because someone needed a Rowland of that name in their tree, they took the easy route and used my grandfather and absorbed him into their tree incorrectly. This has happened so many times now that I will no longer use FamilySearch as a tree source.

The best website currently for documented relationships, in my opinion, is Wikitree. Its global family tree is monitored, and unsourced entries are challenged. Errors can still occur but Wikitree is probably the most accurate at the moment.

There are a large number of genealogy websites where documentary evidence is available, some are free but the better data normally requires a subscription. Please do your own research and don’t take the easy route and copy someone else’s unsupported tree.

DNA Testing

This now leads me on to discuss the use of DNA testing. It is well worth having your DNA tested, both your Autosomal and (if you are male) your Y DNA, preferably the FTDNA Big Y-700 test.

For overall checking of family trees going back 500 years or so, Autosomal tests are very useful for validating whether you have linked family members correctly. However hard you try to get the sources correctly researched there sometimes occurs a problem with multiple people of the same name in the same location and in the same time period. One handy way of sorting this out is to take an Autosomal DNA test and see who appears in the list of people who match you. I have had good results from using this to sort out blockages in my tree. I use AncestryDNA but there are a variety of options. The reason I use Ancestry is their DNA file can be uploaded to pretty much every other website and their automatic tree-to-DNA linking is quite useful (but not always perfect).

I had an extreme example in 2022, where someone read an article² I wrote for the Rowland Genealogy website and used it as his own Rowland family history. The article was primarily dealing with my family history going back into ancient times which had been discovered from my Y700 (BigY) test.  The data was solidly supported by my own DNA but this individual decided to play the name game and use it as his own history!

It is theoretically possible it may have been his history but the person had not taken a Y700 test and that would be the only way to prove one way or another.

So, I implore Rowland males to take this test it may well reveal a history much more interesting than a history lifted from someone else because it is easy.

My message is, please spend the time to research properly and don’t try to do it in 10 minutes using other folk’s data, it will probably be incorrect. I started my research around 1985 and I am still doing it now, it really does take time to do it properly.

References

1. The Rowland Haplotree, by Ron Rowland, published November 27, 2022, by Rowland Genealogy
2. The Essex Rowland Family Story from 10,000 BCE to 2020 CE, by Nick Rowland, published March 4, 2021, by Rowland Genealogy