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Those European lords, ladies, barons, princes and other assorted titled folk sure knew how to build grand homes. Astonishingly large castles are perched on just about every country hilltop in Europe.

One British castle I toured had a "great hall" about the size of a football field. The guide informed us that Sir So-and-So routinely held magnificent parties in this room during the mid-19th century.

While some men in our group huffed about the heating bills and the others ogled the gilded tables and sparkling chandeliers, I peered at a series of portraits on the wall.

There was Sir So-and-So, his father hung next to him, his father next to him, and on down the line going back nine generations.

The clothing and hair styles in each portrait varied, reflecting the times, yet the men all looked remarkably similar. They had the same distinctive long nose, the same sad-looking eyes and the same pointy chin.

I made a comment to the tour guide about the strong physical characteristics that had passed through 10 generations of this family.

"Oh," he replied. "The painting of Sir So-and-So is the only one that's a real portrait. He hired an artist to create all of those other portraits."

A fake family. It's not an original idea but an audacious one, for sure.

Genealogists encounter faulty, fraudulent and flat-out fabricated families from time to time. Sometimes the ancestral fiction is deliberate, like Sir So-and-So's. Usually, misrepresented family histories result from careless conclusions about who was who.

Attach the wrong great-grandfather to your family tree and you're in trouble. Why? Great-Grandfather A (the actual sire of your grandma) has one set of ancestors while Great-Grandfather B (the impostor on your chart) has a completely different set of ancestors.

You could spend 20 years researching and writing about a family line that's no kin to you. Even worse, you could pass this research around to hundreds of other researchers who blindly accept your conclusions. So the mistaken conclusion about Great-Granddad takes on astronomical proportions in the genealogical world.

Genealogists rely on evidence that we collect in order to reach conclusions about who gets penciled onto our family tree.

Aside from scientific DNA analysis, who can say with complete certainty that someone who lived 100, 200 or 300 years ago was truly your ancestor? You can't. But you can reach reasonable conclusions based on the evidence you uncover.

Genealogists look at both direct and indirect evidence. Direct evidence provides information that doesn't require deliberation to draw a conclusion. For example, you want to know Grandma's date of birth. So, you look at her birth certificate and her birthday is listed right there in black and white.

Indirect evidence isn't quite as clear but it can be just as trustworthy. Let's say Grandma never had a birth certificate or it burned in a courthouse fire.

But you see a census record that gives her age, and her marriage license also gives her age, and her tombstone says she died in 1952, aged 70 years, 4 months, and 6 days. If the dates on those pieces of evidence all jive, you can make a reasonable conclusion, through indirect evidence, about her birth date.

When we look at genealogical evidence we also have to consider the reliability of the source. Next week, I'll write about sources we use and how reliable they may or may not be.