Supplying phony noble ancestries for the newly rich has been a profitable business for centuries. Just as there have been forgeries in the arts and letters, so there have been forgeries in genealogy. An entire issue of the Genealogical Journal (19 [1 and 2] [1991]) was devoted to case studies in fraud. The editor, Gordon L. Remington, addressed the topic at a national conference and proposed the following guidelines to detect genealogical fraud ("Charlemagne or Charlatan: Case Studies in Genealogical Fraud," 1994 Federation of Genealogical Societies/Virginia Genealogical Society Conference):

1. Suspicious, inadequate, or no citations.
2. The ancestry provided is "too good to be true."
3. The reasoning doesn't make sense.