Hoax or Fraud?

Question

Some frauds have nothing to do with genealogy:  Send us $500 by western union and we'll insert your name in the will of a multi-millionaire oil baron who just died in (you name the country).  

Genealogy -- fake genealogy -- is intrinsic to other frauds.  The Priory of Sion stories are built around fake genealogies from Jesus and Mary Magdalene to the Merovingian rulers of Europe and on to Crusaders and others.  The fake genealogy gets mixed in with the real and it's a challenge to untangle.

I discover we have two Categories for the Priory of Sion matter -- one is the Priory of Sion Hoax and the other is the Priory of Sion Fraud.  Who knows, it may have been I who created the duplicate inadvertently at different times.

But we only need one, so the question I would pose is -- which is the better descriptive word.  Fraud?  Hoax?  Something else?   

They're both linked to the profile shown below at the moment.

Comments

How about "scam"?

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Why not forgery.

The essence of the Priory of Sion was a forged document so that seems like the best term to me.

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Forgery...! That's the BEST term to use. It's not a slap in the face type of word that delivers an insult. And there are two sides to a Forgery...

The first is an innocent/accidental forgery where individual mistakenly caused a forgery...and they are QUICK to correct the mistake/forgery, etc.

 The second is a purpose-able forgery, where the individual caused a forgery to "scam" others...and in this case the offensive party will become defiant and demand an apology and try to PROVE the forgery is a fact.

Try it sometime... a liar will try to prove his lie as correct....while an "accidental lie" is quickly corrected by the actual person telling the "fib".

Good Luck to all in your research efforts...

Answer 1

Fiction implies made up with no inference of intent.  All of Scam, Hoax and Fraud imply intent.

Comments

Fiction also implies intent to not tell the truth.

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Historical fiction often tries to flesh out the skeleton of a true story.  The issue here seems to be fictional sources.  Call them what they are.

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It is human nature to see an incomplete story and fill in the gaps. We can not see the difference. We have no natural ability to do so in some of the situations which genealogists try to work out.

As Francis Bacon said, people do not have a natural tendency towards the true stories, and that is why they need to be systematically sceptical.

(He might not have used those exact words.)

The starting point for all scientific method is being sceptical, and methodically, systematically so.

Answer 2

I think Hoax is better. This sums up my thoughts on the difference:

Fraud vs Hoax - What's the difference? | WikiDiff

As nouns the difference between fraud and hoax is that fraud is any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain while hoax is anything deliberately intended to deceive or trick.

Comments

If it matters, I believe most of the others in similar categories use the word fraud.

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I agree with Lucy. Fraud implies an attempt to gain something—usually money—and is used elsewhere as a legal term as a punishable offense . Hoax is more like trick, or practical joke—harmless everywhere but genealogy!

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I like hoax too for the type of fantasy genealogy described in Jack's post.

Gustave Anjou's genealogies, which he invented to make money, I call frauds.

I started categories for incorrect ancestors which look like couples taken from Indexed Marriages ressources and used to fill the place of the unknown parents or grandparents of a settler (lots of those in New France). I'm considering calling these Genealogy Errors.

Answer 3

The great critical genealogist J.H. Round liked the word "imposture".

Answer 4

lol, but the books made for great reading.  Call it fantasy, the words hoax and fraud always strike a wrong note with me, as if someone were intent on some evil purpose.

Answer 5

I am going to cheat and give a second answer. In reality, it is very difficult to know the intentions of others. You can say someone's work is well done, convincing, or the opposites of those things. What is a general word for the opposites of those things? We all tend to use words like myth, legend, etc in genealogy (not to mention imposture) but in the light of day what we mean in practice is that there is a popular narrative which is "wrong".

Deliberately wrong? Normally impossible to tell, and in any case see the concept of "Doublethink". Humans mislead themselves. The two key properties are "wrong" and "popular" (or some other description of how well-known and widely-believed it is).

Answer 6

I believe hoax, fraud, and scam imply some criminal intent and would not want to use them.  Even fake, fiction or fantasy have negative implications.  

May I suggest FALSE genealogy?

Answer 7

I'm inclined to go with Forgery as John Atkinson suggested.  Not every piece of bad genealogy has a forgery at its heart, but when you do, it's good to call it that.

What you have here is a document that was forged for an ulterior purpose, and part of the forgery was a fake genealogy.  It has then be retold and retold and become a legend, but it started with a forgery.