Why do I I keep finding people on my family tree that I'm not related to?
I don't know who posts the misinformation, but someone is mistakenly spelling my fathers name wrong and attaching me to a family tree that I'm not related too. How do I remove the wrong information? And who is it that gets to determine who my relatives are?
Best Answer
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Quite often this can be the result of a naive person following a research hint without checking. It's easily done because an inexperienced user is more lilkely to think that the system knows more than they do. Also an inexperienced user will not know how to gain more information from the hint and thus confirm and refute the proposal. The unfortunate reailty is that the hints are often totally wrong. No that's not true, not totally. The names may match, but that's about all. They'll be in an entirely different part of the world, and from another era, but the "Hinter" has concluded that it's worth a punt.
If your ancestors were William and Mary don't be surprised if they end up marrying in Felixstowe, living in Chepstow, and dying in Krakow.
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Hi Cheryl Things you can do to put this right, on your fathers profile put in sources say a birth certificate to prove the spelling. Also on life sketch write a short story of your fathers life and lastly there will be a contact link in blue on the person who last made changes to your fathers name, you can also do this by looking to the right of the boxes which name ancestry etc, scroll down till you see recent changes and email the person who made the last change,. Hope this helps.
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There is no concept of "my family tree" in the huge, open-edit FamilySearch Family Tree.
As far as you last question is concerned, anyone can dispute "your version of events" that have been inputted (say by you) against your close relatives. Believe it or not, sometimes (though I'm not suggesting this applies in your case) strangers can find records that give more accurate detail than a close relative can provide.
As PMLynch suggests, try to reach out to those who have made incorrect changes - the Change Log will show who made the last edit/change, and provides a link to directly message that person. Hopefully, they will respond to any message querying, say, incorrect spellings or movement of relatives (actual or assumed) to or from your family branch.
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I found a way to remove this last mistake on my tree. My grandfathers name was Jacob Raymond a common name in the Mennonite community. All from Germany and then migrated to Pennsylvania. Hard to mistake when and where my family name came from. For some reason he changed his name to J R using just his initials. I suspect he left the community because he married my grandmother who already had a child. Probably a no no for that religion. He took off for Kansas and had 4 more kids My dad was named Jay Ray after him not a common name. He later just went by Ray. That's where the mix up begins people spell his name all wrong and attach it to my tree.
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a great video to watch - that explains the collaborative nature of FamilySearch
and the concept that we really don't have our own "private" tree
WHY USE FAMILYSEARCH FAMILYTREE
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