Last week I was thrilled to find - so I thought - another great aunt. We put her photo on our Facebook group HERE and remarked on how much she looked like Nan. Well, she does indeed look like Nan but she's nothing to do with our family. Why did I think she was? Because an Ancestry member had copied chunks form our tree onto theirs - including photos without asking permission - and added our great grandparents as her parents.
I sent two messages with family info to the tree owner. He ignored me.
Today I found the mysterious Letty. This was Nan's sister who was apparently shunned by the family. Nice. Mum had remembered before that she had two daughters, one named Maud who was older than Mum. Today she remembered that Letty had married a man named Saxby. I put the name Saxby in the tree and did a few searches and found that Mary Victoria Williams (not Letty - I wish they wouldn't mess with people's names) had married Charles Eli Saxby. They had two daughters Maud and Lilian.
The problem is Mary Victoria was born in 1899 and so was Mary Frances. You don't have two daughters six months apart with the same name!
I searched for Mary Frances and couldn't find any documents. On the other hand there are several references to Mary Victoria. You can see them on our Ancestry tree if you log in to www.horswillfamily.comm our private site. So Mary Victoria wins today's prize of being my great aunt. Or grand aunt as Ancestry would have it.
So I clicked on the name of the other tree owner to contact him. He's decided he doesn't want to be contacted by anyone and he's made his tree private. Charming! Let's hope he enjoys borrowing our ancestors and their photos or - here's a suggestion - maybe he'd like to do his own research and not be so rude as to ignore contact from other members. I really think Ancestry should prevent those with private trees copying the information from anyone.
I've written to a couple of members who have Letty in their tree so we'll see what happens next.
