When the Family Tree Lies: A Guide to Fraudulent Genealogies
Somewhere in almost every genealogist’s research folder sits a pedigree that looks a little too good. The line runs straight and clean for six or seven generations, and then — suddenly — it connects to a medieval knight, a Viking king, or a coat of arms. No gaps, no “probably,” no messy parish handwriting to puzzle over. If you’ve felt a small thrill at finding a chart like that, you’re in good company. You’re also in exactly the position generations of genealogical fraudsters have counted on.
Fraudulent genealogies are as old as genealogy itself, and they’re not a fringe curiosity. They sit on real library shelves and in real archives. These days, they are in real online family trees that get copied and recopied. Over time, the fabrication looks like consensus. So knowing the history of fraudulent genealogies matters. Also, knowing what it looks like when you meet it is one of the more useful skills a family historian can develop.
The professional fabricators
American genealogy has its own rogues’ gallery, and it’s a longer list than most beginners expect. The most notorious name is Gustav Anjou, a professional genealogist active in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He built a business on client-pleasing pedigrees. Anjou would take a small commission fee and hand back a beautifully bound family history. These pedigrees reached back centuries, were always flattering, and very often invented outright. He wasn’t alone. Names like Horatio Gates Somerby, Charles Henry Browning, Charles Arthur Hoppin, Orra Eugene Monnette, Frederick Adams Virkus, and John S. Wurts appear again and again in the scholarly literature on genealogical deception. Usually, this is because a later researcher went back to the actual parish, court, or land record the fabricator claimed to be quoting. When they went, they found nothing there.
The pattern is remarkably consistent across all of them: the fabricator had genuine expertise (enough to make the pedigree look plausible to a non-specialist), a paying client who badly wanted a noble or notable ancestor, and no real interest in whether the underlying documents existed. Some cases, like the so-called Horn Papers describing early settlement in western Pennsylvania, weren’t the work of a single dishonest genealogist. Instead, they were an outright historical hoax. Later historians eventually proved these manuscripts fraudulent because they couldn’t reconcile them with the documentary record.
Then there were the fraudulent publishers, companies like the Media Research Bureau and Halbert’s Publishing Company, which took mass-produced “family history” boilerplate — vague, generic narratives about “the [Surname] family” — and mailed it to anyone who shared that surname. These companies dressed it up to look like personalized research. These weren’t even pretending to trace a specific line. Instead, they were selling flattery by the thousands.
When a God Becomes an Ancestor
Some genealogical claims reach beyond medieval kings and noble families into mythology itself. Odin, the chief god of Norse mythology, appears as an ancestor in medieval royal genealogies, including those of Anglo-Saxon kings. These pedigrees were not necessarily attempts at fraud in the modern sense. They served to give royal dynasties an ancient and prestigious origin. Over time, some traditions linked Odin to legendary Scandinavian kings and extended the lineage further back through figures such as Sceaf and Geat.
The problem arises when legendary pedigrees are copied into modern family trees and presented as documented ancestry. A tree that traces a living person back to Odin may look impressive, especially when dozens of generations are neatly connected. But a long list of names is not evidence. Medieval royal genealogies often mixed legendary figures, religious traditions and claims to political legitimacy. They cannot establish that Odin was a historical person, let alone prove a biological descent from him.
This is an important distinction for family historians: a pedigree can be historically interesting without being genealogically reliable. Before accepting an extraordinary ancestral claim, ask where the links come from, which sources support them, and whether those sources describe documented people or preserve a legend. The further back a family tree reaches, the more important those questions become.
Norway’s own case: Jon Bratt Otnes and the crown that never was
Norway has its own version of this story, and it’s a good reminder that fraudulent genealogies isn’t only an American, English-language phenomenon.
Jon Bratt Otnes was born John Jakob Otnes in Kristiania (Oslo) in 1919, into a family with genuinely humble roots. His great-great-grandfather had been a husmann, a cotter, at Otnesbukta in Aure, on Norway’s west coast. Otnes had an interesting enough real life on its own. He trained and performed as a lyric tenor before the war. Later, he worked as a trade advisor for the UN in Indonesia. He also headed a Norwegian trade ministry office. Eventually, he served as honorary consul-general for Albania.
None of that satisfied him. Starting in the 1970s, Otnes began circulating a heavily doctored ahnentafel — an ancestor chart — that supposedly traced his father’s line back through the medieval Norwegian noble family Bratt. He claimed it went all the way to Norway’s and Sweden’s medieval kings.
On the strength of this invented pedigree, he began publicly styling himself “pater familias Bratt”.
He also claimed that he was, by right of blood, the legitimate king of both Norway and Sweden.
The case debunked
The claim circulated for decades and caused genuine controversy in Norwegian genealogical circles between the 1970s and 2000. It didn’t survive contact with the actual records. The genealogist Tore Vigerust dug into Otnes’ documented ancestry and found that it could reliably be traced back only about four generations. This was to Lars Olsen Otnesbukta, a husmann who became a landowner in 1898, and beyond him to an Ole Toressen who brought the family to Otnesbukta around 1800. There was no documented link at all connecting that line to the medieval Bratt nobility. The “Bratt” surname itself turned out to be genuinely confusing. There were at least three unrelated Norwegian families who carried it. One was from Trondheim, one of Kongsberg bergmenn and Numedal klokkere, and the ennobled Swedish Bratt line Otnes tried to attach himself to. Otnes died in Oslo in 2004, apparently still convinced of his claim to the day he died.
It’s a case genealogists in Norway still cite as a cautionary tale, and it maps almost exactly onto the American pattern. There is a real, humble ancestry quietly discarded in favor of an invented noble one. This is built on a chart that skipped the tedious, well-documented cotter generations. It jumped straight to a flattering conclusion.
What these cases have in common
A few patterns show up across nearly every fraudulent genealogies, whether it was manufactured in New York in 1910 or Oslo in 1975:
- The motive is almost always flattery or money, not scholarship. A client paying for a report wants an impressive answer. A man building a public identity wants a crown, not a cotter’s cabin.
- The fabrication targets exactly the point where real records get thin. Anjou and his peers thrived because European parish and manorial records genuinely do become sparse and hard to access for pre-1600s generations — the perfect place to insert an invented link that’s hard for a client to check.
- The pedigree skips the boring, plausible generations. Real family history is full of unremarkable farmers, cotters, and tradespeople. Fraudulent pedigrees tend to compress or erase exactly those generations in favor of the exciting ones.
- It gets copied before it gets caught. Anjou’s fabrications were absorbed into other published genealogies; Otnes’ claims circulated in the press for thirty years. Once a fake pedigree is in print — or today, once it’s in an online tree — it gets copied by people who have no idea it was ever challenged.
A practical checklist
None of this means every impressive pedigree is fake, or that you should assume the worst about every generous-looking family tree you find online. However, it does mean a few habits are worth building into your own research:
- Just because something is printed in an old book it is not necessarily true.
- Follow every claim back to a named, checkable source — a specific parish register, court record, or land transaction — not just a citation to another compiled genealogy.
- Be extra skeptical exactly where the record trail should be thin. If a line suddenly becomes crystal clear right around the point where documentation typically disappears, that’s worth double-checking, not celebrating.
- Notice when a pedigree conveniently confirms what someone wanted to believe. Noble ancestry, a famous namesake, a royal connection — these are exactly the claims worth the most scrutiny, because they’re exactly the claims people have historically paid to have manufactured.
- Check whether anyone has already investigated the line. FamilySearch’s wiki maintains a running list of known fraudulent genealogists and publishers, and it’s worth a quick search before you build on an older published family history.
- Remember that a well-documented cotter or tenant-farmer ancestor is not a consolation prize. In both the Anjou cases and the Otnes case, the real, verifiable ancestry — modest as it was — turned out to be the only part of the story that was actually true.
The families that get invented are almost always more interesting once you clear the fiction away and look at who was actually there.
You might also find my article The Pygmalion trap in Genealogy interesting.
Further reading
- FamilySearch Wiki, “Fraudulent Genealogies” — a running reference list of known fraudulent genealogists, publishers, and hoaxes
- lokalhistoriewiki.no, “Jon Bratt Otnes”
- Wikipedia, “Jon Bratt Otnes”
- Wikipedia, “Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies”
