Ancestors ( and their children) merged away

JennieHealy

Help please, I have lived in Australia for most of my life, as did the overwhelming percentage of my ancestors since early to mid 1800's.

How do I stop people repeatedly changing the details of several of my relatives to living and dying in USA. One is Great Grandma who danced at my wedding. I had to write several times, send copies of certificates etc several times before they would stop.

I have just had my great grandaunt Mary Elizabeth McDonough removed after being merged with Nancy Elizabeth Catherine. Their names are not at all similar, they were born in different continents. why do people do this without at least contacting the original person who supplied all the information. Is there a way to stop this happening repeatedly when the person making the changes does not respond to messages through the Family Search website.

CHold

@JennieHealy

We are sorry that you are having problems with in correct merges. Because this is a public tree sometimes that happens. There advantages and disadvantages to a public tree an we can understand your frustration. Sometimes others can help you find information about your ancestors and sometimes they can cause problems with an incorrect merge.

The best you can do is provide as many sources, memories, collaboration notes to document why you have the information in family tree as you do.

Here a a few help articles that may assist you:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-undo-a-merge-in-family-tree

There is really not a way to prevent anyone from merging people and agreed some people are not careful in looking at all the sources, and details (ie: name, place, relationships and dates). You can contact the person that did the merge and collaborate with them asking why did the merge and indicating your concerns. You can contact them by going to Latest Changes finding the merge and clicking on the name of the person that did the merge and collaborate with them through FamilySearch.

Also, since this seems to occur on the same ancestors I would recommend that you select Follow on the ancestors that you see this merging happening over and over. Here is the help article about that:

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/can-i-follow-an-individual-in-family-tree

Another option is to create your own private database of your ancestors on your own computer. That way when any changes happen in FamilySearch you have a copy with the complete information that you have privately: Here is a link to third party FamilyTree management softwares that may give you some piece of mind:

https://partners.familysearch.org/solutionsgallery/s/list?category=family_tree_management

Hopefully this will assist you with your question.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I think that most such erroneous changes result from People Unclear On Concept: no matter how often and in what form they're told that this is a single, shared tree, they fail to comprehend what this means, and continue to behave as if it were their own private mess, like on Ancestry or MyHeritage. When they find a profile that looks vaguely like who they believe to be their relative, they don't let minor details like facts interfere; if the relatives aren't who they want them to be, they feel totally free to just hijack the profiles and change them into their version of reality. These are also the people who cheerfully believe that the officials at Ellis Island forced their immigrant ancestors to change their surname from Rosenkowicz to Smith, and other such utterly ridiculous stories. (For the record, no officials at Ellis Island or elsewhere had any authority to change anyone's name.)

As for what you can do... Broadly, I think of it as two options: reclaim or re-create.

Reclaim means to revert the incorrect changes and restore the profiles to who they're supposed to be, disconnecting the incorrect relationships along the way. It can help to make copious use of reason statements and sources, and sometimes, contacting the other person (as kindly as you can manage) will result in a lightbulb finally going on.

But sometimes, none of this does any good, and the other person re-does all of the erroneous changes. After a round or three of this, it may be time to just give up on those profiles: detach them from your relatives where it all starts going wrong, and create new profiles for your actual relatives. Detach "your" sources from the messed-up profiles and attach them to the new, clean profiles, and remove all references to your family from the branch that you're abandoning. You can also leave a Note or Discussion on the Collaborate tab of the profile(s) that used to represent your relative(s), explaining what you've done and why.