Fake family trees online may trip up genealogists

"It can be a very profitable source of income. Some people make millions of dollars a year doing it," Anderson said. "The whole purpose (of Fake Family-style sites) is to trick the search engine, so they get a top listing for some search words" to attract more visitors and potentially more revenue-producing mouse clicks.

Search engine companies say they hunt for and remove from listings any sites that are bogus or that scrape content from other sites merely to act as a vehicle to carry advertiser links.

But Fake Family boasts in written information that it can fool search engines. It does not merely produce lists of random names, but links them generation-to-generation with bogus birth, marriage and death dates and places.

It adds that its randomly generated names "are era-specific," meaning you will get more names such as Orville and Bertha in the 1880s than the 1980s. Infant mortality, marriage rates and migration data is also encoded, and more. It's the rich family "experience" that Fake Family provides that is significant and makes the output stunning in its ability to look real to humans.

Internet advertisers helped the Deseret Morning News identify a few genealogy sites that appeared to contain only bogus information, along with plenty of advertiser links. Harrold, however, said he only knows of one generated by Fake Family (even though he said in written information that he has "monetized" several family history sites).

"This is scary to me," said Mindy Koch, an Internet advertiser from North Carolina and an avid genealogist. "There is a great chance that a novice could think this is real. If they download it, and then later upload it into repositories like (the LDS Church's) Ancestral File, those databases would include lots of people who never existed."

Also, she added that it potentially could make search engines more difficult to use for genealogy if bogus sites slow them or account for all the "top hits."

Harrold says such threats are imagined and not real. He said the chances of randomly selected first and last names, coupled with randomly selected places and dates, being shown as married to the same persons as people who actually lived "are not just slim, they are nonexistent."

He said if someone still mistook such information as real and downloaded it, "that's their fault." He adds, "If you want real family information, why are you not looking at Census records? If you're not paying for it, and I didn't ask you to take it, and the name and date don't match your family tree, why are you taking this information? Any onus is on the people who take this information."