How to post a general note to a tree in Family Search
This tree has multiple problems and in my view should be disregarded.
Best Answer
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Could I offer a slightly different take on this advice?
- If you're in your own personal tree, yes, it's fine to change the identity of a person you created. But in a shared tree, the original identity should not be changed, for two reasons: 1) If temple work was done, it was most likely done for the original identity; 2) Other users depend on the identity staying stable. Please don't ever "hijack" a record and change it to represent a different human being. This defeats the purpose of working in a shared tree.
- I also strongly recommend against creating new people if you don't want to clean up a mess. This also affects temple work. It creates duplicates. It has the potential to cause confusion and a repeat of the errors one is trying to avoid by creating the new copies.
- There is a legitimate third option when you find a mess (besides cleaning it up or creating duplicates)--leave the mess alone. Let someone else with the time and desire clean it up. All of us have only so much time and we have to choose how to spend it. It's better to leave a mess alone than to make the problem worse.
That's my advice, for what it's worth. I hope it's helpful!
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Given that the tree on FamilySearch is a communal, cooperative endeavor, errors in it should be fixed, not disregarded. You can do this yourself; if you don't know how to do something and cannot find the answer in the Help Center, you can ask here in Community.
To post a note or discussion on a profile, click the Collaborate tab at the top.
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This being my hobby, I decided to take a quick look and couldn't see anything seriously wrong. I added some sources and inputted some birth / death details, but could not find a marriage between Michael Allbright and Sarah WHITEHEAD (surname from children's birth registration records in GRO index).
If you have any additions or corrections just fix things, as Julia suggests.
Update - After taking a further look, yes I am a bit confused myself. The 1901 census record attached to William Allbright shows him to be a widower with two children. Christine Eva Allbright has a birth registered - 1884 at Croydon - but with mother ROSE, not VENN. But I could not find the birth of Charles F Allbright - only a Charles Frederick VENN, whose birth was registered at Fulham in 1883, mother COMLEY.
Unfortunately, I am about to sign-out for the rest of the day. Whilst I can see this looks a little confusing, it still doesn't mean these inputs are invalid, just that a little further "digging" is required - and for you, I, or anybody else to make any necessary adjustments to the true relationships.
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Yes - plus Monty and Chrissy (Christine Eva) were childless. Mary Venn was the first wife of William Joseph Allbright, and she died. He had known Susannah years before and they later reconnected, married, and had a family. Picking away at the problems was a fools errand for me. Better to delete the whole tree and redo it as a better option. I can't delete someone else's work.
None of us know who Charles F. Allbright is either. But I disagree - there ARE invalid inputs, invalid because they are just not correct, and all the goodwill in the world will not change that.
I simply felt that an error warning should be noted on the tree. I don't see how to do that.
T.N.
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Broadly, there are two ways to deal with a "so wrong I just want to start over" tangle: the messy/lazy method, which is to simply detach the relationships with the incorrect people and abandon them in favor of newly-created, correct profiles; and the neater but more labor-intensive method, which is to edit the relationships and profiles until they are correct.
For a profile that doesn't appear to reflect any real-world person that you can find, the same basic idea applies: you can either detach and abandon it (with notes about why, in case a helpful soul wants to come along later and re-propagate the error), or change it into someone who did exist, either by editing the vitals (if that existing person doesn't have a profile yet), or by merging. Hijacking a profile like this is best undertaken only if the apparently-nonexistent person looks like he probably originated as a mistaken version of the real one. For example, if there's no evidence for a Charles F. Allbright, but there's a Charles F. Venn with some of the same relationships and vitals, merge or change Mr. Allbright into Mr. Venn.
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FYI - I have been trying to sort out some of the relationships in connection to William Joseph Allbright. Still none the wiser as to the identity of Charles F Allbright. I discover the 1885 death of Charles Frederick Venn, so just a coincidence with his same year of birth (1883) and surname of William's first wife. I'll try to take another look tomorrow, time permitting.
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Just one other point (at least for the time being): whilst there indeed seems to be no documentary evidence for the births of either Charles F Allbright or Arthur F G Horlock, evidence suggests these individuals (whoever they were) did have some connection to the Allbright / Horlock families.
Charles has a 1901 census source attached, which clearly suggests he was the son of William. Arthur is found alongside Montague & Christine in the 1939 National Register source. Of course, the original documents might show these names have been transcribed incorrectly, but (without having access to these) it still seems that Deanna Sommer has acted quite reasonably in trusting these records contain correct details, then proceeding to make these (incorrect) links. They were quite possibly related in some way, but their births registered (if at all) under other names.
It looks as if these identities will be very difficult to stablish. However, for now, you do have the option of detaching relationships you are sure are incorrect. For Charles, you can click on the "Edit" link alongside his name any remove his relationship with William. Similarly with Arthur - just remove the relationship with these "parents", so he no longer appears in this branch of the tree. Ideally, it would be best to find their true identities, then place them under their correct parents, but in some cases such mysteries just cannot be solved.
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Attaching more historical records, it appears on GDM5-3L3 the given name Charles is an enumeration or transcription error. Other records give his name as Cecil.
Is this Cecil? https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2XV2-TQ8
Also, Susannah Rose had a prior husband, surname Brand. After she died some of her children are in a Rose household, likely Susannah's close relations.
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The Cecil F. ALLBRIGHT in that other tree could be Frederick Cecil ALLBRIGHT who is recorded as marrying Lily Bessie SELWOOD in the Swindon registration district in 1905. But any of this could be a mistake in the original record, or a mis-transcription.
Is anyone in this thread a down-streamer of, or related to, this family? Because, someone in that family must have a more complete (and maybe more accurate) record. The information I have on them is very spotty. Some of their genealogy is gathered into my larger tree, but then so is that of Charles Martel, Harry Hotspur, Werner von Braun, and Jane Austen.
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. . . and of course, sometimes people are commonly called by other than their birth-certificate name, and this aberration is given in good faith to the census enumerator.
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I assume this is the right place to leave notes re a particular family useful to a researcher:
Of William Joseph & Mary ALLBRIGHT's three known children (known to me), Alice and William died infants. If my data is correct, the other child, Louisa Victoria, married a Frederick George DENNETT. Their child, also Louisa Victoria, also died an infant. So no known further downstream offspring from the Allbright-Venn marriage. As reported in the Croydon Advertiser, Mary ALLBRIGHT died aged 27 in early 1874.
I have a note saying Susannah ALLBRIGHT's first husband lived 1841-1870, and was a mariner. I can't vouch for this though - I don't remember where or from whom I got the info. If I ever come to a dead stop with my own tree I may go back and pick at some of this stuff just for the hell of it.
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@tonynewman5 those notes belong in the Collaborate tab on the relevant profiles on Family Tree.
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Thanks DIKY.
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@kathryngz, If no such person existed, then surely the work attached to the profile is moot anyway, no? Y'all don't enact rites for fictional characters, do you?
As I said, "hijacking" should be limited to situations where two conditions are met: no such person existed, and there existed a person who is similar in many ways. In other words, it's not really hijacking, because you're not changing the profile into someone totally different. You're just correcting some fairly major errors that have been made. Yes, it's a fine line and a slippery slope, and I'm glad I've always been able to just watch from the sidelines, rather than needing to wade into the middle, but sometimes it's better to make the choices and clean up the mess yourself.
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I couldn't agree more kathyryngz.
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haha @Julia Szent-Györgyi , you're absolutely right--temple work isn't done for fictional people 😄 So if one can prove the person is fictional, the person should be deleted rather than hijacked.
Of course, users can only delete people they created (and only if no other users have made changes). So if a user determines a person in the tree is fictional, they can either 1) contact the creator of the fictional person and ask for the person to be deleted, or 2) they could contact Support and have them delete the person.
It's just dicey in a shared tree to change the original intended identity, imho.
Kathryn
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In calling up the 'Add a new discussion' window, does anyone know whether your comment, question, etc., AUTOMATICALLY links back to the originating data, or does the initiating record have to be re-stated in order to provide context?
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Discussions on Family Tree profiles don't link to anything except the profile. Good practice is to copy-paste the URL of the historical record into the Discussion. You may also want to include the PID; this is helpful in case the profile is merged in future.
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https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/99T7-99L This tree does not accord with my information in several respects. Can the compiler(s) of the tree reveal why the unconventional hopping between surnames generation to generation: Dyson, Sealy, Baldwin, Edwards. It looks like a series of errors, but there may be a valid explanation underlying the apparent confusion.
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The confusion with surnames seems to be related to the traditional naming conventions for many Spanish cultures, which use dual surname
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs#Basic_structure
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I agree with Miss Jessie: a user (with a Spanish name himself) is apparently trying to apply Spanish naming customs to this thoroughly English family. I'm wondering if the erroneous assumptions were prompted or supported by the second child, who has his mother's maiden name as his middle name.
However, @Anthony Newman_1, when you speak of "this tree" and "the compiler(s) of the tree", you make me wonder whether you understand the nature of the Family Tree on FamilySearch, namely, that it's all a single, collaborative tree. There is no "compiler of the tree": there are just fellow users who have contributed to a profile or group of profiles. You can contact any of them by finding one of their contributions and clicking their names. Whether they reply or not, if the information currently in the tree doesn't match the sources (either already attached or newly-added by you), you can correct it yourself. For example, you can remove "Sealy" from the last name field for all of the children, since none of them used it. (And you can either get rid of "Esq." entirely, or put it where it belongs in the suffix field. Having it in the title field like this is ...disconcerting, even to me, and I'm accustomed to rearranged names, due to being Hungarian.)
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No, its nothing like that. To understand my observation you'll need to scrutinize the tree I identified, then you'll see. Thomas Fournis Dyson for instance was never renamed Edwards - but the rest of the name switches too. Must be confusing for users (supposing they even recognise the anomalies).
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@tonynewman5, no, Thomas Fournis Dyson was never named Edwards -- but his mother was. Likewise, his mother was never named Hargreaves -- but her mother was. That's the Spanish model: when a man named G H I marries a woman named V W X, their child C gets the full name C H W, i.e. the father's first surname as first surname, and the mother's first surname as second surname. (Yes, it's every bit as complicated as it sounds, or actually, more so, because every part can have multiple elements.)
I've looked through several generations of the Dyson family in both directions, and where there's an extra surname, it's always the mother's maiden name, and always has the same Spanish-named user as contributor. I suggest contacting him to ask for any evidence that this English family ever followed the Spanish custom. Without such evidence, those extra surnames should all be deleted.
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