the building of profiles on Ancestry

This is why I don't get started changing and fixing my cousin's tree. I suspect she inherited most of the information on it and didn't do research on it as I have been doing. But all trees are like that, and it's possible that Ancestry itself, in its electronic wisdom, pulls profiles out of its files and links them. Thus you have a choice, if their profile has something you don't agree with: either I start a new profile for this person, or I link to it and accept it even knowing it has some flaws.

Her Mary Coke profile is interesting, but if you just read it, Mary is born in 1718, gets married in 1730, and starts having babies right around then. At 12! Somehow I doubt it. Also, she's married in Clerkenwell, Middlesex - doubt that too! Several other things I noticed while going through - One son, Thomas, was born in Chester PA - are we to believe that these two parents, who already had seven at that point, simply went over to Pennsylvania to have this one? I'm not criticizing my cousin here because I suspect, as I said above, that she either imported the information without reading, or, Ancestry did it for her. And, she's not the only one. I suspect her Mary Coke profile is similar to everyone else's just as her tree is similar to several others. It's only when I read it that I have a problem. Two Williams who both lived out full lives? It seems oone would have to be an imposter.

So I encountered this other tree, which I will refer to as the MR tree. She has a profile called Mary Muir Coke. Her Mary Muir Coke actually has a mom who married two different men, one Mungo Muir. No explanation of how she got that Coke name though. My first question here is, by putting two family names in her name, is MR asserting that Mary Coke & Mary Muir are the same person? Is she leaving us to guess where the Coke part came from? (just as an aside, though Coke could be read as Cooke, that doesn't give a person a million more choices - birth facts are very sparse for this Mary Coke, a little better for Mary Muir).

So MR has a little more & a little different info, but equally random things that also might appear as errors. She has the marriage in England in 1730 (to WW 1711) but also another one to WW 1711 on July 16, 1736. While this other marriage has a better location, Eaglesham Renfrewshire, and definitely better as a mental image (now she's 18, not twelve), it renders the first two of her 16 kids as before marriage. Four of those 16 kids are Williams, by the way, as opposed to only two on the Mary Coke profile - and two of those have the same birthdates, meaning they are only separate profiles for some other reason, some difference in claims. I look at putting a link on a profile as like a claim that they are linked, one you may not think about or even do deliberately, or even do at all, since Ancestry itself may be making these links. But in these cases I look at it as if MR is saying that these kids are kids of Mary Coke Muir.

Her Thomas is also born abroad, not right, as is her Robert. It's like she's claiming that Mary and WW 1711 went abroad to have these kids in randome towns in Pennsylvania. I don't think so. But she comes up with a few more people, people who were just born at some point in there and seemed to have Mary Coke Muir as a mother. OK. I'd like to say it's good that each of us has access to the work that everyone else has done. I am in fact grateful, just a little curious about how Ancestry throws it all together. I have more dates and possibilities to work from. And it seems very clear that WW 1711 and this Mary woman were kicking around Ayrshire for years, even if they were from the great Wallace clan of Cairnhill.