Okay, Jonathan, now that I have vented my spleen, I will play nicely again. :) Regarding imprinting, here's how I see it... and others are welcome to disagree. Goslings have an instinctive tendency to attach themselves to the first creature(s) they see. In ideal circumstances, this is good old momma goose. They follow her and look to her for protection, guidance etc. She teaches them and if they get out of line, she corrects them - very firmly. One of the things the parent geese seem to teach their young is that humans should be kept at a little distance. "They may be nice creatures, little goslings, but they are NOT GEESE." :) Incubator goslings, or goslings removed from their parent just after hatching, have no mother goose to imprint on. Instead they have this human who feeds, waters, protects etc. So they attach themselves to this human. If the human responds by treating a gosling with all the handling and affection that one would accord to a puppy or kitten, the gosling grows up with no natural boundaries between it and the human. Some people feel such a goose lacks respect for humans. I'm not sure this is exactly the right word... but it's close. It certainly lacks inhibitions regarding its behaviour toward the human. When breeding season rolls around, along about the following February, the geese - and particularly the ganders - are suddenly flooded with hormonal urges. If the gander lacks the inhibitions that would normally keep him at a safe distance from human "intruders" he MAY vent his over-protectiveness and possessiveness of his lady by attacking the very humans who nurtured him -- or any others that venture too near. A goose-raised gander may normally hiss and snake his neck to warn people to keep away while he and his lady raise their young, but a hand-raised gander is more likely to go further than that, and bite and/or flog the human with his wings. It hurts plenty... and if this happened to a small child, serious damage could be done. This being said, goose behaviour even during the breeding season is influenced by the underlying disposition of the individual bird. And this inborn disposition MAY be affected by genetics. Hence one breed gets good reviews (particularly Pilgrims and American Buffs) whereas certain others (particularly the Asian breeds which are not descended from the European greylag) have a reputation for aggressiveness. Certain breeds, and the Pilgrim is one of them, have been selectively bred for good dispositions, making it less likely that they will be aggressive as they mature. In addition to this, Pilgrims are auto-sexing and even a beginner can tell the males from the females at a glance. This makes it much easier to be more reserved in one's handling of the ganders in particular. Last year, when I added a pair of Pilgrim goslings to the mixed breed family my two geese were raising, I took pains not to handfeed or pet the gander gosling. He was naturally reserved and I encouraged him to stay that way. I think the only time we picked him up or even touched him was once when we saw blood on his feathers and needed to check the extent of the injury. The female gosling was more friendly and when we had the geese out in the pasture for extra grazing she soon followed her foster mother's example and learned to take dandelion greens from my hand. I don't do this a lot with her; but Willow, (my first Pilgrim who was of necessity hand-raised) comes looking for attention from time to time. She is a sweetheart even during breeding season and Elsie follows her example. I do believe that one has more leeway with female geese than one has with ganders, but even Willow does not appreciate me handling her goslings when they are small. (And I respect this, except when necessary to return a gosling that has squeezed under the fence or otherwise needs rescuing. Even then Willow can be quite huffy about it... but not aggressive.) Get me talking about my geese and I can go on and on... but I think that is enough to add at the moment. Please understand that these are subjective observations from a person who has just over two years experience with geese and that the sample of geese I have worked with has been a mere dozen. What I am doing with my geese now is working well for me and for the geese. They are friendly, but not lap geese. They are always glad to see us and give us a loud, joyous welcome; they know their names and will come when called (if they feel like it). Willow, with her winning ways and extremely sweet nature, is ALMOST a pet. The other two are not. But all of them enrich our lives, make us smile or shake our heads at their antics, and are altogether very satisfactory creatures to have about the place.

Lov_mkitchen complains, "In other trees I have found my information turned into an ancestry file.....what do they call them.......family data or something like that. And passed off as a shaky leaf when in fact it is not a documented fact at all. A family cemetery I did for findagrave, out in the middle of a farm field turned into Iowa Cemetery Index. My word only that those people were buried there and the facts I supplied were correct. How's that for a source! I had a person who I suspected died in a certain place at a certain time that I put as a fact with the disclaimer of "as much as I know now" that turned into an ancestry hint complete with her personal information. Anyone finding that would assume it was correct. ancestry has turned into a big hat with all sorts of bits and pieces thrown in. Stick your hand in, pull a fact out, add it to your tree. No research needed." From the Ancestry.com web site: "The Shaky Leafs are Ancestry Hints designed to aid you in your family history research. They provide other records in our database that could possibly match the individual in your tree. These hints are automatically generated, and are there for you to determine whether or not the record hint matches the individual in your tree." [emphasis in original] If you, Lov_mkitchen, see a Shaky Leaf and take it as documented fact, that's YOUR problem. If other people see a Shaky Leaf and take it as documented fact, that's THEIR problem. Some of us are not willing to accept everything that's out there as documented fact. I never, ever, accept anything on anyone else's tree as documented fact unless and until I see the documentation for myself. Then, and only then, will I add it to my tree. I have well over 5,000 people on my tree. Not nearly as many as some, but many more than others. And every single name has been researched and verified before being added. You've also said, "I'm helping them to the point that I have made information available that wasn't on the site previously." And you have undoubtedly gotten a lot of information from Ancestry.com that wouldn't have been easily (if at all) available to you otherwise. Genealogy research is a give-and-take proposition. We take a lot more than we give (that's the nature of our research, after all), so we (YOU) really should stop complaining about other people taking our information when we post it to a public web site.

Oh, I am using the classic view now but it won't be a choice before long. I did look at the New and Improved site. Twice. Hated everything about it. Ancestry doesn't care what the user thinks. When they did other stupid things and we gave our 2¢ they just plowed ahead and did what they wanted, not what we wanted. The comments idea is just to pacify us. Which it doesn't because we all know their mind is already made up. Money. It's all about the money. I'd like to know how much they spent making us so unhappy this time. It's making it very easy to break the ancestry.com habit, though. Considering what I had tentatively budgeted for next year, I can do something else really nice for myself and it won't involve ancestry.com. I'm getting everything off of there now. I'm so sorry I started the ancestry DNA but I will abandon it there and concentrate on Gedmatch. I found that the DNA matches at ancestry are the same people I have already made contact with and if I want to look harder, just search for family trees. My advice is save your money on the DNA kits. You will find the same people using the family tree search there. Use the connect feature or the contact button. What is really worrisome is them collecting health information. Now, that is scary! They won't implement any way for us to work with our DNA data but they'll gladly write down every health problem we have. They aren't going to do anything that will help us; they're going to sell the information to 3rd parties.

I’ve had my DNA done through Ancestry and use it mostly for cousin matching. Within each person's ethnicity estimate, you can expand each region to learn more about it. Ancestry has a series of short videos on their DNA test that I found very informative: https://www.ancestry.com/academy/course/ancestry-dna-101 There one video of less than 7 minutes that’s specifically about ethnicity. You might want to check it out. As I recall, it said that the ethnicity estimates go back 500 to 1000 years.