#sloppy genealogy 'research' is one of my pet peeves

[archaeologysucks]

I just spent an entire day untangling a knot in a friend's family tree. It turns out that about 100 years ago, some careless researcher accidentally smooshed together two guys with the same name, in spite of the fact that they lived in different states. Even though this person appears on nearly 500 people's family trees on Ancestry.com, and dozens of people have submitted him as their qualifying ancestor for the Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution, no one has ever taken a second look and thought, "Hmm ... it's a bit weird that this feller was still living in Pennsylvania 15 years after he died in Ohio."

Anyway, I think I have it all sorted out now, and I wrote up and posted a document explaining my reasoning, attached to his profile on the tree I made. I hope it is helpful to someone, and that I'm not about to have 100 angry DAR/SAR members show up at my door with torches and pitchforks because I said that their Revolutionary War Soldier Boy ancestor wasn't actually, and they're not as super special as they thought they were.