Online Fake Genealogy -- Surname scams

 

To legally and legitimately claim an authentic Tanner coat of arms, a researcher must trace their direct, unbroken male line back to a specific ancestor who was officially granted or recognized as bearing those arms by an official heraldic authority. Because there is no authentic, traceable lineage of my particular Tanner family past the most remote ancestor who lived and died in Rhode Island, there is absolutely no way to connect my family or my family name with a coat of arms. Scams aimed at connecting a family line to royalty, nobility, and some sort of coat of arms are fairly common today. Sometimes there is a tendency to use pre-paid pedigrees and faulty research to establish the claim. 

Coats of arms are primarily granted by official heraldic authorities, such as the College of Arms in England or the Court of the Lord Lyon in Scotland, through a formal petition process resulting in Letters Patent. Applicants often need to demonstrate merit, such as public service or professional achievement, and pay fees to have a unique design created and registered. See Granting of Arms.

Genealogy scams exploit your family history to steal money or personal data. Watch out for phishing inheritance emails demanding "processing fees", hacked messages or fake websites selling generic surname books, and data theft where scammers map your living relatives for identity fraud. 

What is crucial to involvement with genealogy is being aware that many of these "fake" genealogies appear on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and other online genealogy family tree programs. It only takes me a few minutes on my family lines on the FamilySearch Family Tree to find lines going back to the 1200s and earlier many of which have no sources. 

You can begin to see the issues when you look at the descendancy of one of these individuals.

If you take the time to click up and down in this particular type of entry, you will see that majority of these names have either one source or zero sources. So, even if you personally do not fall for the fake pedigree scam, you may still have a lot of scammed names in you acestral lines as they are shown by FamilySearch.