King David of Israel - GENI IS SHOWING TODAY'S JEWS LINKED TO KING DAVID THROUGH ARAB MONARCHS !!??

See https://www.geni.com/projects/Testing-for-Fake-Medieval-and-Ancient...

There are no traceable lines back to King David. The line you are seeing just hasn't been cut yet.

Your path is at https://tinyurl.com/ybp2w948

As with all deep paths, there is some truth and some guesswork/fantasy mixed in. It is easy to say it is wrong. The hard party is identifying the mistake.

This one looks a bit suspicious. Sohaemus of Ituraea

Last year's change broke several thousand family histories from their lineage from King David. As best i could understand it, the links were cut on the say-so of one or two curators, on the premise that one ancestor could not have moved from Spain to Germany (or vice versa; i forget which).

I almost quit Geni over this erasure of our history, but at that point i had devoted so many hours to adding family profiles, building the big tree out, and researching biographies that i was unwilling to give it all up.

Then came the Arabic royalty links, boy, that was a laugh. How many Jews who formerly descended from King David -- and were told this in their families decades before the invention of Geni -- are now being told by Geni that we descend from David and Solomon only through Arabs? Thousands of us, i am sure.

To me, unfortunately, there is a connection through these names, but suggest you read the story about Bostanai the son of the exilarch Hananiah. Hai Gaon.
He married a non-Jewish princess (because of that That's why there is the non-Jewish names), but, nothing to worry about, she converted

Haim, i understand that and agree with it. but what i am talking about is that when i go to the profile of Hillel the Elder and click the push-pin, to trace his lineage, and then look up King David, the Geni algorithm tells me that there is no descendant connection between Hillel and David. It tells me instead that

"King David of Israel is Hillel Hazaken - 'The Elder' grandfather of Gamaliel I's daughter's husband's 23rd great uncle's wife's niece's husband's fourth cousin five times removed."

Yet in my family, all along, going back through what my grandmother said, we are descended from Rashi and Rashi from Hillel and Hillel from David.

And, here in Geni, going back to Hillel, unpushing the push pin and checking my ancestors, i learn this:

Rashi is my 26th great grandfather

Hillel is my 74th great grandfather

King David is my 99th great grandfather

Boaz is my 101st great grandfather

Rahab is my 102nd great grandmother.

Jethro is my 105th great grandfather.

Abraham is my 111th great grandfather.

But, again, my current link to David s not through Hillel, as it used to be, but through Arab monarchs, and Hillel is no longer a descendant of King David ... in Geni.

The rest of the world says he is, of course. And many of us think that Geni has broken something that never needed to be broken.

Is Hillel's descent from King David truth or was it a fiction? That i cannot judge. But given how imprecise genealogy is and has always been, it makes no sense that Geni curators drew some kind of crazy line in the sand and declared that Hillel is not descended from King David.

I come to King David through various branches of my family, and indeed I too have the long way, but the geni algorithm is looking for the short way, and there is nothing to do, the short way is through Bostanai. I also when saw for the first time the Muslim names I was angry and did not like it. ,,I'm a Jew and proud of it !!! Cohen, the second generation of the Holocaust, a direct descendant of the great and important rabbinical dynasties, when I saw the names, I was very angry, but then I read, and I understood where they were taken from,

I also thought of another thing, I come to King David through his son, King Solomon, there are other children of him also with other women (I am from Bat Sheva), it is clear that he will show us a slightly different way

RASHI רש״י is your 26th great grandfather.

Hillel Hazaken - 'The Elder' grandfather of Gamaliel I is your 71st great grandfather.

King David of Israel is your 94th great grandfather.

If I check through Jewish names (the long way), King David is my great grandfather around 100th

Cutting relationships on Sohaemus of Ituraea - as there are no sources.

Catherine Anna Manfredi Yronwode is your 10th cousin once removed.

sharon,
Now after what you have done:

King David of Israel is your 96th great grandfather.

It is very nice to see that King David and Batsheva are my great grandparents. It gives me a good feeling, but I suggest we all concentrate on the family tree that is much closer to our generation. I assume that King David has many thousands of descendants today

:-) He's my 101st gr grandfather. It makes me smile too, but this is temporary.
I think we need to all get our minds around the fact that genealogical history is based on primary documentation, and showing the line to David using primary documentation on a genealogical site is ultimately not going to be possible.

Geni should implement a new sort of linkage between profiles - legendary or mythological descent - which doesn't count as a parental linkage, but which can show some of these sorts of relationships.

That would apply to a lot of other family trees, aside from the Davidic lineage (i.e. Roman senior families claiming descent from mythological characters etc).

Geni does have the option to build mythological / legendary trees - and this is what we're aiming for.

Haim, thanks for noting that we are DNA-line cousins. I am attempting to "follow" each profile at Geni with which i have a straight blue DNA connection. I wish Geni had a button you could click that would do that automatically. I follow a few more every week, and now i have followed each person on the DNA line between the two of us.

I am still concerned that as of today, in Geni, Hillel is not a descendant of King David. This goes against what hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other online sources.

From personal experience, geni's algorithm sometimes" goes crazy." For example, once he showed me that a great great grandfather is rank 11 (and that's true), his wife is rank 15, her grandfather is rank 14 to me
but once every two weeks (I think), a circle appears, you can click on it, and then everything is reset.
Especially for you, I have now examined the connection between me and Hillel the Elder:

Hillel Hazaken - 'The Elder' grandfather of Gamaliel I is your 71st great grandfather.

https://www.geni.com/projects/Working-with-Relationships/17570

Haim, yes, i understand what you mean when you say "geni's algorith sometome 'goes crazy.'" When i last recorded the data, as i noted above, Hillel was my 74th great grandfather! Now he is my 71st great grandfather, He is growing closer to me every day. Maybe if this trend continues, one day i will be my own grandma! LOL!

Sharon Doubell of course we can already (and in many cases do) build mythological trees on Geni.

I'm talking about something more like the "adopted parent" linkage type. i.e. a way of formally representing that profile X (historical person) is connected via legend (and who knows how many generations) to profile Y (mythological character).

I know we can do this already via the profile notes section as well.

What I think formalizing this will do is a) show some of these linkages in tree form, without some of the silliness, and b) consequently, hopefully, reduce the amount of sabotage.

My family tree, for example, is very complicated. From my great grandfather on every side, I come to rabbinical families and dynasties, to build an independent tree ,It's almost impossible, certainly I do not have the books and resources that the curators at geni have.When I encounter problems / questions, I turn to curators (do not always get answers).I found that if I wanted my family tree to be true and accurate. .
the best way is to stick to the master profile that the curators opened at Geni
.
I found fake profiles that people opened (and found quite a bit), they just copied things right and integrated their data, I guess these are religious people who try to show "yichus" they do not have, especially for "shiduch".
In myheritage, too, I have received confirmations for people who have opened fake profiles.
So, as far as I can tell, when you are truly a descendant and have nothing to hide, you should stick to the profiles that the curators open,

Jeremy, you're talking about ways to link the historically valid one world tree to the millions of options anyone can project to connect themselves to the mythological tree. Think about it.
Why would that be genealogically useful?

Sharon Doubell, it was that easy. You just converted me.

I've always thought we should have some way to show mythological links, and at the same time I've worried it would be a slippery slope into every kind of fantasy.

Why would that be genealogically useful? Of course it wouldn't be. Not at all. That was the perfect question.

I gave a pragmatic reason above: as a way to reduce the number of fantastical profiles being created on geni, and to provide an outlet that will stop some of the sabotage that's happening in some family lines.

I don't argue that it would be genealogically useful (although in the case of the Roman senatorial families, for instance, it might have value).

I've always thought this is a question where reasonable people can differ. It should be easy to see both sides. All that happened today is I personally switched sides.

I think the alternative will ultimately look something like what's happened on Wikipedia: theoretically anyone can contribute anything, but in practice there's only a small number of curators who actually can, and when somebody else makes an edit it is quickly reverted.

Perhaps any profile with a date earlier than "X" can only be added by a curator?

BTW, It looks like somebody finally disconnected that huge chain of... creative shall we say... profiles that somebody made dating back to several thousand years before recorded history. Thankfully.

jeremy,
Before the change, the algorithm took me the short way to King David, after the change he took me on the long road (from a quick glance, the "Muslim" names disappeared),

Haim, my wife's tree has similar stuff in it.

She has 222 pages of "ancestors", of which 180 or so are Romans, with the occasional Sassanid mixed in for good measure.

I think the problem is roughly this:

1. There were likely historical marriages between the Romans and the Sassanids, but this profile (Flavia Miriamne .) looks sketchy, and there's likely no historical basis to which children where from which mother.

2. There were also likely several historical marriages between the exilarchs and Sassanid dynasty (I can see several examples in Geni, and I've seen them mentioned in many books, but obviously there aren't many primary sources). The example given here (Sassanid Princess Dara Izdadwar) may not be specifically accurate though, and again who knows which children came from which mother.

3. Various descendants of several different exilarchs are listed as having moved to Western Europe. You can see several examples (there's probably 20 or so) on this descendant report (https://www.geni.com/list/descendants/6000000000961705425#12). The descendants of some of those people are historical (as in: many of them were authors, and their books are still extant), but their ancestries have more gaps than you can see here in Geni.

4. And then there are still issues in the "Rabbinical tree", although that becomes more historical the further down you traverse it, and there's at least some primary sources in many cases.

I think a lot of the above could be cleaned up by setting the children of Flavia Mariamne to "mother unknown" (the King of Persia had many wives, and there's little historical basis for which wife any particular king's children were by). This is where the "mythical descent" linkage would have come in handy!

We might also be able to do the same with the children of "Dara-Izdadwar". The exilarchs also would have been polygamous, and as far as I know there's very little contemporaneous record of which mother is which.

Jeremy, hopefully relationship locking prevents the fantastical profiles being linked.
Projects that document and provide links to the mythological / legendary trees on geni are really great outlets for this area, documenting the lines without linking them to the world tree. (I'm a big fan of these projects as I find them fascinating myself.)

PS Thanks for the vote of confidence, Justin :-)

Sharon, I completely agree re those projects.