Ancestors, everyone has them, and spam, everyone gets it. So, I hope you’re asking yourself, where’s the connection, beside the ubiquity, that is.
A lot of the spam that I have gotten lately is of what I think of as the “Dear Loyal Walmart Shopper” variety. You can send a message with that opening to a lot of people and a significant fraction of the recipients will fall into that category. How many of them will be suckered into believing in whatever prize the sender claims they have won is another matter. The point is that so many people fall into that category, that it can be used at random with a significant chance of being right. You might also get email warning you that it has been detected that your copy of Windows is in serious need of a security patch. Said patch can be downloaded by clicking on a link in the email. Once again, lots of people will be reading that email on a machine that runs Windows. Presumably some subset of them will believe it. Once again, there is a reasonably high chance that sending those emails at random will result in a large fraction of the recipients being people running Windows. Believing that it is for you personally, just because an email is addressed to “Walmart Shopper,” or that because an email is sent about Windows and you’ve got a Windows machine, that it must be legitimate, are clearly mistakes.
When we think about the implications of evidence we find in genealogical research, we need to think about coincidence and probability as well. Some evidence can be like those examples of spam. It looks legitimate on the surface, it looks like something interesting, and yet it only seems relevant. If enough people look at it, someone is bound to concluded it is close enough to be relevant. Remember, that someone might be you. Of course, to someone else it might be real evidence, but to you it is just coincidence. It might be random chance or it might be a cousin of the person for whom you’re searching, named for the same ancestor. Either way, they only way to think about these things is to think about the probabilities. What is the probability of another person with the same unusual name in the same area? Higher than you’d think if there was an earlier ancestor with that name that both people are named for.
When you get an email that opens with “Dear Loyal Walmart Shopper,” you ask yourself if you are, in fact, a loyal Walmart shopper, if not, you mark it as spam. What if you really do shop at Walmart often? What if you really have an ancestor named Ichabod Wilkins? Then you take the next step and examine things more deeply. Would Walmart send an email without any branding or mention of their website? Would Ichabod appear without any of the expected family members? Would an email from Walmart really come from wmart.winners@cashcow.biz? What was your Ichabod Wilkins doing two states over from where he is expected to be? Would any legitimate business send you a prize claim form as a zip file in an email? Did destitute Ichabod really leave an enormous estate to a child you knew nothing about, and no one else?
Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on spammers. They are, perhaps, providing the best practical education in critical thinking there is, though unfortunately as a sort of natural selection by survival of the most wary.
Remember, critical thinking isn’t just good for recognizing the signs of spam, you can recognize the signs of illusory evidence about your ancestors too. So, in conclusion, please click here to download your free royal ancestor.