How to spot and fix family tree errors - impossible dates and tangled relationships
A family tree can look perfectly neat and still be quietly wrong. A child attached to the wrong parent, a birth year with a typo, the same great-grandmother entered twice under slightly different spellings - these slips hide in plain sight, and they have a habit of surfacing at the worst moment, like right after you’ve printed a poster for a family reunion. This guide covers the mistakes that creep into almost every tree, and how to catch them early.
The reassuring part: as you build in the RootsPrint editor, the app quietly checks your work in the background and flags the issues worth a second look - so you don’t have to be your own proofreader.
Impossible and improbable dates
Dates are where most errors live, partly because a single mistyped digit can go unnoticed for months. The classics:
- A child born before a parent - usually a typo (1897 keyed as 1798), or a child attached to the wrong generation entirely.
- A birth date later than a death date - the two fields got swapped, or one has a slip.
- A parent far too young for their child - a parent barely a few years older than their child almost always means a mistyped year or a child hung a generation too low.
- An impossibly long lifespan - a span of well over a century usually points to a stray digit in a birth or death year.
- A date in the future - a birth or death year later than today, which is nearly always a typo.
RootsPrint watches for exactly these plausibility problems and raises a gentle, non-blocking flag when something doesn’t add up. Nothing is changed for you and nothing stops you working - each warning simply links to the person involved so you can take a look. When you do, the fix is often a one-character correction that saves a genuinely embarrassing mistake on the final chart.
Children attached to the wrong parent
This is the sneakiest error because the tree still looks fine - the boxes and lines are all there, just pointing at the wrong people. The tell is usually in the relationships: two people showing as full siblings when you know they’re half-siblings, or a cousin who’s landed a generation too high.
When something feels off, trace it back to the child and check which parents they’re actually connected to. Nine times out of ten, correcting that one connection makes the whole surrounding branch snap back into sense. The relationship calculator is a great cross-check here - if it names a kinship you know is wrong, you’ve found your loose thread.
The same person entered twice
Duplicates creep in easily, especially after importing a file or building the same branch from two directions on different days. You end up with “Margaret Ellis” and “Margaret Ellis” as two separate people, each holding half the relationships they should share.
Watch for two entries with the same name and overlapping dates. Pick the entry you want to keep, re-point any relationships the duplicate holds onto that person - link the right parents, partner, or children - and then delete the stray duplicate. That keeps your counts honest and stops the tree from implying two people where there was only ever one. If your statistics show more people than you’d expect, duplicates are a likely culprit.
Names, spellings, and maiden surnames
Not every problem trips a warning - some are just judgment calls that make a tree cleaner and more searchable:
- Record people under their birth surname where you can. A woman entered under her married name is far harder to trace back into her own family line.
- Be consistent with spelling. “MacDonald” and “Macdonald” as two people is a duplicate waiting to happen, and it breaks search.
- Use the notes field for the uncertain stuff - “surname possibly anglicised”, “date estimated” - so future-you remembers what was solid and what was a guess.
Let the statistics sanity-check you
Once a tree grows past a couple of dozen people, the statistics view becomes a quiet quality check. A generation count that’s larger than you expect can hint at a misplaced person; a total that keeps climbing past what feels right can point to duplicates. It’s a useful bird’s-eye pass to run every so often - the numbers often notice patterns your eye glides straight over.
Build a habit of reviewing, not just adding
The best way to keep a tree trustworthy isn’t a single big cleanup - it’s a light touch, often. Every so often, open the validation warnings and clear whatever’s accumulated. Spot-check a branch you know well. Glance at the statistics. None of it takes long, and it means the tree you eventually print or share is one you can actually stand behind.
Because here’s the thing: a family tree is only as valuable as it is accurate. A beautiful chart built on a misplaced generation isn’t a keepsake - it’s a misunderstanding in a nice frame. A few minutes of checking is what turns a good-looking tree into a reliable one.
Open the editor to review your tree, and browse the guides for more on building, backing up, and printing it.