Why do some Discovery Pages look like works of fiction?

John Rees III

I've only seen two Discovery Pages and both were so riddled with errors, that I'm not going to look at any more. One has my ancestors listed as Lords, Ladies and Knights, illustrated with coats of arms that belonged to completely different people. These lords and ladies were in fact tanners, cloth merchants and drapers. They spelt their names differently from those shown. Why does a self-respecting organisation publish such rubbish when current research on the family has been available in print and on line for at least the last 15 years.

Such errors make me wonder if the records that I have relied upon from Family Search are similarly contaminated.

PiperTWilson

@John Rees III - I was having that issue, also. You weren't being blocked. I don't know what caused it, but I'm glad it's over!

Amy Archibald

The information on a Discovery Page comes directly from that person's Family Tree page. If you are finding errors on the Discovery Page, they are also in the Tree. You can fix them in the Tree and they will be fixed on the Discovery Page.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/fix-errors-on-a-family-tree-discovery-page

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/changes-to-discovery-pages

John Rees III

In the first two pages of trees I found 17 different occurrences of the person, mostly incorrect. I don't know which tree you use for Discovery pages and I'm not going to correct numerous trees.

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! am also having difficulty in accessing this community, 9 times out of ten I suspect that I am being blocked?

Susan Ann Mullen

Discovery pages are not research pages but more like fun pages in their case to give context. In that way they can be informative and helpful. I would not rely on them for research any more than the fun matching faces to ancestors game.

John Rees III

Thanks for explaining that. I've been doing family history for about 30 years. Some of the speculative entries in the old IGI seem to have survived and I suppose it is these that are surfacing again.

I must admit to not finding research as fun, but rather as a long slog to prove accuracy. Though it is nice to find the odd malefactor amongst the ancestors 😀

Thanks for your tolerance of my sarcastic remarks; I know I shouldn't make them, but they slip out when I am tired at the end of the day.

Gordon Collett

The goal with Family Tree is to give its users the chance to create the most correct tree possible with one, single page for each person. The original database that opened in 2021 was created from every database Family Tree could combine including the IGI, the PRF, the Ancestral File, the collections of extracted records, and others. It includes everything contributed back through the past 125 years. All the stuff that we could never correct before we now have in one place and it can now all finally be corrected.

If you see 17 occurrences of the same person, then someone in your family, if you have no interest in this, has a bunch of work to do in cleaning up the database. Not to correct 17 different trees, but to merge all of them into one single branch of the tree then make all the needed corrections.

The actual historical records on FamilySearch are completely separate from FamilyTree in their own databases. The indexes of those records, as has been true forever, can have errors, but the actual records are just pictures of the books. Those can't be "contaminated." However, they can be cross-linked with individuals in Family Tree to support true information and finally get rid of "speculative entries in the old IGI" once and for all.

At that point, the basic information on the discovery page will be just fine.

John Rees III

Thank you for your explanation. I had hoped that some of those old speculative records had died the death that they deserved but they seem to have been reincarnated !

Unfortunately I am old enough to have no family and my spare time is spent making sure that my own ancestral website is as correct as can be. I wouldn't be able to do that without all the records that the Church so kindly provide.

The 17 occurrences of the same person date back to before the Mayflower, so I'm not volunteering to combine all those trees. I wouldn't mind being able to delete some of the completely incorrect ones.