Using Ancestry to find "Lost Cousins"

Peter's article in the latest Newsletter was very appropriate for me as I have recently been searching family trees on Ancestry or Mundia to find possible distant relatives. I am naturally inviting any I find to join Lost Cousins!

It is very important to sort the wheat from the chaff, as many of the published family trees contain a lot of rubbish. A lot of the rubbish is probably the result of the Hints that encourage you to add connections that are not appropriate.

If two researchers only add their own ancestors to their Lost Cousins page they will NEVER find a link if the common ancestor had died before the 1841 census. This is why Peter is right to comment that we should all try to add our cousins' ancestors as well as our own. This problem can be worse for distant relatives who emigrated to Australia or New Zealand in the mid 19th century: they may only have been recorded on a single England census before emigration.