Am I just being paranoid, or do you think this person really has a connection? This person contacted me via Ancestry.com's message system, so I clicked on his/her profile to see if he/she had any family trees at Ancestry.com. This person did, but it had nothing in it. It was basically a blank tree.hi, your information keeps popping up in my searches and i think we have similarities in our trees i would like to collabrate
Another email I received looked like this:
I was doing a Goggle search for photos of Pembertons & I notice several submitted by you. Are you related to the family?
So I emailed this person back and gave him a brief pedigree on the Pemberton line going back to my 4th great-grandparents. The initial email he sent did not concern me too much because he mentioned a specific surname. But his response did concern me:
I can say with centenary my sister found proof of us being related to both the Civil war General but the man whom invented Coca Cola too as well.
Aside from the fact that I am annoyed by people who are certain all Pemberton's are related, especially to General Pemberton and the inventor of Coca-Cola, it freaked me out a little because the word "centenary" is a very personal word to me and it doesn't make sense in the sentence. I went to college at Centenary College, and it can sometimes be used to prove my identity. Perhaps this is just a spell check error. I'm sure he meant to put "certainty." Still, I found it odd that he didn't give me any more detailed info on his own pedigree. So I stopped all communication at this point.
I just normally don't send vague emails to people about genealogy. I will usually mention at least one ancestor or surname in a first email to someone I think has a connection. I suppose my fear is that these people are interested in identity theft.
Does anyone else ever get these kinds of emails? What do you usually do about them?
