How do I delete something from my family tree (that someone else has added) that is incorrect?

ken amiano

A great great grandmother on my family tree has been deleted. In her place another individual and her husband have been added. I know the addition is incorrect. What do I do next to correct this mistake?

HawkinsAlanArthur

Hope this helps.

If an important relationship in your tree was deleted, don't panic. You can restore it from the Latest Changes list.

Before you start, be aware that you cannot restore a relationship if one of the individuals in the relationship was deleted either manually or through a merge. First restore the deleted individual, and then restore any deleted relationships. Otherwise, continue with these steps.

 

When you restore a deleted record, ordinances associated with the record display on the restored record. If you do not see ordinances you believe are complete, contact FamilySearch Support.

Steps (website)

1. Sign in to FamilySearch and navigate to the Person page of the individual whose relationship you want to restore.
2. If you do not see Vitals near the top of the page, click the Details tab.
3. Scroll down to find Latest Changes on the right side of the screen.
4. Click Show all. A list of changes appears, with the most recent changes at the top.
5. Locate the entry for the deleted relationship. (In the Information column, look for the words "Parent-Child Relationship Deleted" or "Couple Relationship Deleted.")
6. Review available information about the deletion.
   • To see more details, click Show Relationship.
   • To view the contributor's explanation, click Reference.
7. Click Restore Relationship.
8. Explain why, and then click Restore.

anmree

This situation is very frustrating. People are adding to my family tree and the information does not match my research. There should be a way in which we can stop outsiders can change our tree without our permission.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

@anmree, your request is analogous to complaining about people borrowing books from the library.

The Family Tree on FamilySearch is a single, collaborative, open-edit tree. This means that there is no such thing here as "your tree" or "my tree". It is all "our tree".

I agree that it is highly frustrating — or even disheartening — when someone comes along and makes changes that do not match anything that you've found. Unfortunately, the people making such changes are often oblivious to the collaborative nature of the Tree, and behave as if they were working on their own private little bramble on one of the individual-tree sites (such as Ancestry or MyHeritage). How to deal with such changes depends greatly on the particulars, starting with whether the changes may be correct or not, but the first step is to use FS's internal messaging to try to talk to the user(s) who made the changes. Who knows: you could get lucky and turn up a long-lost cousin, or even if not, the person may be willing to undo any incorrect changes and help you clean up the Tree.

As has been said before, in an open-edit collaborative environment, the bad news is that anybody can edit nearly anything — but the good news is that anybody can edit nearly anything, and the system preserves a full history of the edits that have been made, in each profile's Change Log. This means, among other things, that data that was here once does not need to be re-entered (re-typed) in order to be here again. So fear not, and go forth and edit: if you or anyone else makes a mistake, it can be fixed.

Ashlee C.

Because this thread is old, it will be closed. If you have anything new to add please start a new discussion.