Best Of
Re: how to place farm worker when importing census
@PamNana - there is a third option. Do NOT do anything with them. Just ignore the entry altogether.
You should only ignore them if you don't recognise them as a member of the family at the farm. I'm assuming that you don't recognise them, in which case you are free to ignore them and not attach their entry to anything. If you do ignore them you will get a message against the attached Source Record saying "This source has not been attached to all people found in the record" Don't dismiss it, just ignore that message, leaving it there. It's fine to do that.
So why do I advocate ignoring the entry? Why not attempt to create a new profile as @Wayland K Adams suggests? Because if I do that, I probably have to start thinking about whether any possible match identified by the FamilySearch site is the farm worker or not - that's bad for me. I have my thinking hat on about the family on the farm. The last thing I want to do is suddenly start thinking about someone else before I've finished with the family living on the farm. It's a complete disruption of my thought processes and can therefore result in errors. And if FS does identify a possibility, how on earth do I know it's the worker in question? The suggested possibility might have died as an infant - a researcher into that family might know this - I certainly don't.
I could just create a completely new profile for the worker but this is going to be a pain in the posterior for anyone researching that worker's family because they will then have to merge my newly created profile into an existing profile, and doing a merge is always more complex than just attaching a source.
Please don't ever feel that just because you can do something, then you should do it. Someone else might know a lot more about your unrelated farm worker than you and you're not stopping them from doing anything if you ignore that record.
Re: How do you stop repeated hints
The URL for the source is probably different. For example - with my family members in Iowa, I will have upwards of 3 sources for their birth record. The record looks the same, but the sources are different URLS from different transcriptions of different collections. Perhaps the record is on the city level, the county level, and the state level. All may show the same image, but are actually from different collections. You will want to attach them all to your Tree person so that someone else doesn't use one to make a duplicate profile.
Re: Trees created by non-relatives
As I said, one of the advantage of the open edit structure of Family Tree is that any user can correct errors. Someone being marked as deceased when they are actually alive is clearly an error that should be immediately corrected. Any user can click edit next to the death information, change the person to living, and add the documentation as to why this is known to be the case so that an administrator can review that and get the profile changed to living.
This is the only type of change, by the way, that needs administrative review. All other corrections take immediate effect and and not reviewed by anyone.
Re: Is the user "TreeBuilding Project" taking the tree forward or wasting time?
On their response:
The second stage is for volunteers to tidy up these records - including substituting the wife's maiden name if possible or deleting the married name at least, linking to other records and merging duplicates. There may be a gap of months between Stage 1 and Stage 2.'
The CommunityCensus Project work (on the 1911 census) I encounter is mainly dated 2022 and I believe I have only seen one instance of a woman's married name being changed to her maiden one. Some two years on, there is no evidence that "Stage 2" is producing any improvement to the original work. With the use of FreeBMD and the GRO birth index it has often taken me a matter of minutes to identify the wife's maiden name. However, another main issue has been the entering of placenames and dates of birth. The former rarely appear in standardized form and the latter is usually written as a year (e.g. "1875"), when census records are known to be wildly adrift when it comes to the recording of ages, so at the very least "about 1875" should be inputted, rather than an exact year. Also, I sometimes see different spellings of the same surname being inputted for different members of the same family, which seems to be taking the "indexing exactly what you see" instruction a bit too far.
I have sent Chat messages on several occasions to "CommunityCensus Project" (a couple answered by "Joe"), but these have provided me with little confidence that there will be any improvement in these flawed practices when it comes to future projects - presumably again involving inexperienced volunteers following poor PIs.
Sadly, anyone who could help in improving the quality of this work (or, hopefully, see that it shouldn't be linked to the Family Tree project at all) seems to be in denial about the amount of damage being caused by its poor standard - and I haven't even mentioned the problem with the creation of a huge amount of duplicate profiles (well, not up till now)!
Mandy should be commended on the time she is dedicating to the issues relating to these various BYU projects, but I remain doubtful that her / our highly constructive criticisms will lead to any positive improvements regarding what is proving such a pain to all of us who are encountering (and having to clear up) the end results of such poor work.
Paul W
Re: Records for Females who get married and take on the husbands Surname and how should it be done?
This is a good question. The alternate names you provide can certainly can make a difference in record hinting and searching, so it's helpful to do it right.
For your example of Marianne Underwood, I believe you intended to write "Marianne Preston" for your entry 2b.
An entry that provides the married name of "Marianne Preston" is indeed helpful. But it would be more specific (and thus more helpful) if that alternate name were specified as "Married Name" instead of simply "Also Known As". The alternate name type won't make any difference in hinting or searching, but it will make it clearer to other researchers where it came from.
The entries you listed in 2a and 2c are exact matches of the primary name "Marianne Underwood" and so they are needless clutter and could be deleted with no loss of information or functionality.
Simply entering a spouse will not be nearly as helpful as entering a married name for finding additional records (through searching or hinting) that may contain only the married name and not the maiden name. Also note that in some cases you may have identified a Married Name for a woman before you have been able to locate the actual husband, and so you can supply the Married Name when there is no spousal relationship yet. That can aid you in finding records that will identify the husband.
One reason that a good set of alternate names is helpful in searching is that when you use the feature on the Person Page for Search Records (in FamilySearch), the search will be prepopulated with up to 3 alternate names attached to the person (as a side note, that "up to 3" restriction provides a motivation to clean up redundant alternate names so that truly useful names are populated).
What you proposed for your mother looks good. The important detail for the married name(s) you enter is that they should match what actually will appear in records.
Re: Trees created by non-relatives
@John73300 One point that a lot of users have trouble with when they first come to Family Tree, is realizing that aside from the relatively small number of living people we might add, we are not working in any kind of private or personal tree. Family Tree is a one-world, wiki-style, universal, open edit tree in which all users have equal editing rights to all profiles in the tree. We are not working on "our" trees. We are voluntarily working on FamilySearch's tree of the entire human family in which there is to be one and only one profile for every person who has lived who can be documeted.
Since there is to be only one profile for your mother, all of your 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc, cousins of any remove should only work on that one profile that you have been working on. It doesn't matter who originally created it and if there are duplicates they need to all be merged.
Living people's privacy is protected so you will never see any profiles for living people in Family Tree. That is why you can't see a profile for that other user.
Deceased people have no privacy so any and all information about them can be added to the tree.
There are two great advantages to this open edit tree we are working on together.
The first is that when we find incorrect information on a profile we are interested in, as you are with your relatives, then we can correct it no matter who originally entered it. We are expected to defend our corrections with sources and reason statements.
The second is that if you have a bit of a sticky genealogical question, say trying to work out the correct families and relationship for four different Mary Smiths who were born the same year in the same small town who all had fathers named John Smith and mothers named Jane Jones, it can be very helpful to create profiles for all four Marys, that is the one you are related to and the three you are not related to, so that you can carefully work out their proper husbands and children and get the correct sources on the correct people. Then when the relatives of those other Marys start working in Family Tree, they don't have to repeat your careful research and won't accidentally get confused and turn your Mary into their Mary.
Take time to edit records for accuracy
May I suggest that if records have the EDIT available to use on it to please check and make sure the handwriting matches what the site says it should say? I find that at least 50% or more of the indexed records by the site don't match the writing and are in need of editing. I take the time to do that when I'm doing my research. It's a great idea to help eliminate mistakes too because you may find that certain records probably shouldn't be on some people due to errors in the indexing process by the site.
I know there are folks who are in a hurry to build trees so they don't look at the writing but instead take for granted that the Family Search site got it right. Most of the time it missed and in some cases I've seen it miss big! Volunteers are probably the biggest offenders because they never look. They click and collect records and put them on people just thinking they are helping clean up but in reality they really aren't helping much. In fact at times this draws errors later on if the records have not been corrected or checked for accuracy.
Let's work together to help improve the accuracy and maybe eliminate errors. I know it takes a bit more time to spend to do this and verify the accuracy but it's well worth it in the end. Make sure the site says what the writing says. You can also add additional fields too while you are editing that also help.
Re: Bottom of page
This was happening to me for a while a few days ago. I was able to get rid of it by clicking the "Less" button that appears at the top right of the image in your post. The system remembers your last setting of More/Less and applies it thereafter when you open other profile, source linker and home pages, and maybe other pages too. I've no idea why anyone would want this behaviour.
When I saw the problem, I was using the Source Linker. Each time I clicked ATTACH, the attach completed but when the page updated, it automatically scrolled to the bottom with the expanded bottom section occupying all of the visible screen. Once I had collapsed the bottom section, the problem disappeared.
Today, I tried to reproduce the problem. While the More/Less setting still sticks, I haven't been able to get the screen to automatically scroll to the bottom, which is a small mercy.
Re: A.I. Rules for memories
I know of some generated images already in the tree, added by some one I helped with her research. I agree they have no place in an accurate family tree.
