Tim & Cassandra Dowling's Genealogy Research. Anybody else seen this yet? (Over 500k people listed!)

[AverageJoe90]

Hey there, fellow genealogy buffs & aficionados. As many of our research trees grow, we can sometimes find cousins, no matter how close or distant, whose discoveries can add a whole lotta spice to our trees.

Well, I've got something for you. Tim & Cassandra Dowling were the first people to upload a tree to Ancestry.com's WorldConnect service and have amassed over 500k people in their tree to this date. Among them, including *dozens* of famous folks; celebs, Presidents, generals, governors, and yes, even the occasional noble.

And here it is:

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tdowling/

Famous Relatives of the Dowling Family:

http://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=dowfam3&id=I39232

[AverageJoe90]

2. Here's a few of mine.

Samuel Eddy, 9th great grandfather, b. 1607, d. 1683.

Arthur Allen, 9th great grandfather, b. 1608, d. 1670; built the house that later became famously known as "Bacon's Castle".

Roeloff Gerritse VanDerWerken, one of the early founders of New Amsterdam.

And that's just a few from me.

[AverageJoe90]

4. Mine were all from Va.

Every last one. (Bacon's Castle is in Surry County, Va., about 75 mi. due southeast of Richmond.)

[Iterate]

5. The ALLEN (R) DNA Patrilineage Project

http://www.johnbrobb.com/JBR-ALLEN-R.htm#ProjectDirectory

The colonial Allen surname got to be a mess in the last 12 years or so. DNA testing is slowly sorting it out, so that it's now possible again to know which lines of evidence to trust and even to extend it. There is even a marker for the four of the five original Va. Allen families. This whole project is pretty good.

My New Amsterdam Brouwer, DeRaet(Drake), and Bogardus families send their regards. Possibly more if the DNA can show which of several questioned marriages are the real ones. Religious nutters on one side of the family, peasants on the other.

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Ugh

I just had a look, and it's rife with errors. I've found multiple things that just aren't true that I know aren't true because they're my own lines that I've done extensive research on (and they're contradicted by primary sources).

[AverageJoe90]

7. Now you've got my attention. Could you elaborate?

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. To be fair, the errors were quickly corrected in the database after the corrections were submitted

(which I did for all of the erroneous information on my own lines that I've found so far); the fact that I found erroneous info for multiple colonial-era ancestors though makes me question the data overall; it looks like most of it is just sourced from other pedigrees or from the LDS database without any kind of source checking or verification. For instance: they show Daniel Boone as a descendant of Edward III of England through his mother; this has been disproved (see here); John Whitney, John Davenport, and John Prescott, Massachusetts colonists, as having royal descents (they don't, see here); Edward Dorsey (or Darcy), emigrant to Maryland, as a descendant of the Anglo-Norman gentry D'Arcy family (he's not; that's been conclusively disproven by DNA testing).