Genealogy Errors on Ancestry.com for Clifford Family

Hello genealogy fans and Clifford family history fans,
Question: Are you paying out the nose for ancestry.com and getting wrong info? Please see this Clifford family problem =

My cousin is a member of a million genealogy websites and organizations. OK not a million, but several dozens. Im very interested in my ancestor John Clifford of Hampton, NewHampshire who was there no later than 1641 (after a short stay in nearby Salisbury, MASS). My cuz gets a bunch of magazines and also newsletters, including Clifford Association newsletter which has helped her run the family genealogy back almost 1000 years. Not kidding. (Seems once you find some sort of (Europe) titled person in the fam, the paperwork on the pedigree is very detailed and goes back hundreds of years. So she has let me access her work on ancestry.com. I cant change anything but I can see it. She has also let me read some of the articles on the first Cliffords in America that was started by the founder of the family organization responsible for keeping the pedigree alive. Guess thats a big deal. Anyway, my brother has used a lot of the info to start a family tree on ancestry.com of our own. Both he and my cousin have been constantly bombarded with those hints that show up with a leave icon that are just wrong in a big way. How do I know that?

Last year I took a trip to for business and took 10 days off afterwards to visit England and Ireland. My brother asked me to get him a souvenir from one of the ancient homes of the Cliffords, and I ended up going to a number of them (almost by accident! seems the Cliffords had a lot of land at one time). Many of those old castles are just piles of rocks, unfortunately. But not every one. So the coolest was a castle in Skipton, Yorkshire. Beautiful place and very popular with tourists. I had info from my brother and asked an employee at the Skipton Castle about whether the ancestry.com hints that George Clifford who was the Earl of Cumberland was the father of the George Clifford of Boston. The reaction I got was precious. The English are to nice to laugh at you outright but this lady almost did. She said, no! And that George Clifford the Earl had an illegitimate son named Geoge, but that he died like a year before the american George got to Boston. She asked me how come so many people think that (I guess they are getting that a lot). I told her all I knew was that ancestry.com was putting that out. I also googled it but most of them have listed completely different parents from different places, mostly Kent, just like my cousin says.

My brother spends literally hundreds of dollars for ancestry.com but he is thinking of terminating his subscription if the hints they are so proud of are wrong, and I told him I would ask the Reddit crowd their opinion on this. Thanks guys for your 2 cent's worth.

Posted Feb 25, 2026, 9:00 PM UTC

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