Creating autogenerated text is apparently more difficult than one would think in the new “lifestories” at Ancestry.com.

The “lifestory” generated by Ancestry.com for my ancestor James Rampley (who is in one of my private online trees at Ancestry.com) indicates that his mother died in 1830. I never entered any such thing in my tree as I’ve never located a specific date of death for his mother, Christianna (DeMoss) Rampley. Heaven knows I’ve looked.

My database indicates she died after 1830–and that’s the death date in the purple dot on the “lifestory.”

 

But the lifestory indicates she died in 1830. Autogenerating family stories from database entries isn’t necessarily difficult. It doesn’t make for the most interesting prose, but if done correctly it can accurately reflect the data from which it was compiled.