Second and Third Generations back off limits
Hi,
My idea is simply this: to prevent people who are not directly related to your parents/grandparents from making changes to these people, let's make them off-limits.
I don't know about anyone else, but when I come onto FS and see that someone has made a change to my mother's information, or her parents, it's very disturbing especially as I know all of my siblings (there's only 2 living) and I know of all of my 1st cousins on both sides of my family. None of them would be so presumptious as to change where any of our relatives were born, what their middle names are, who they married or when...
Please let me know what you think.
Linda
Comments
-
I'm not directly related to anyone in my spouse's family. Should I be prohibited from working on their genealogy?
If someone finds a record about my grandmother, should it remain forever unknown to me, because the person who found it isn't a relative?
What about the countless people -- famous or otherwise -- who have no living direct relatives left? Who would make the determination about who can edit their profiles? Or heck, who would make the determination for any profile?
2 -
Regarding the changes you see, this is generally due to getting confused by similar names and not carefully examining the whole profile. Often it is due to careless merging.
The best thing to do is to have everyone in your first three generations back, that is direct ancestors, aunts, uncles, etc. on your Following list. Then you will get an e-mail within a week of any change and can promptly get in there, check the change, correct anything needed, and contact the person who made the change to let him or her know what went wrong.
By keeping things open this way, you will also have the chance to see what on your relatives' records is incomplete, inconsistent, vague, or confusing, as well as what sources are missing, that allowed someone to confuse his grandparents with your grandparents. With time you should be able to plug all the holes and make it impossible for anyone to confuse your family for theirs.
You can also prevent this from recurring by taking the opportunity to look at the parents or grandparents of this other person and do some research there to improve that record with more information and more sources so that it is so complete that that person could not possibly be confused with someone in your family.
3 -
To support the comments above, if I find an individual has been wrongly attached to my family I not only detach their relationship to my relative(s) but then go on to (try to) find a correct place for them in Family Tree - i.e., connect them to their correct parents, etc.
Unfortunately, this highlights a flaw in your argument, whereby if it was implemented I would have to just leave these individuals alone, if they were not related to me, making it easier for another user to make the exact same mistake - in (re)connecting the individual I'd detached from my family.
1 -
However, in connection with this topic, what would be nice would be if there were better blocks to declaring someone deceased who is less than a specified number of years old. Far too many people come to Family Tree and find their very healthy parents or grandparents marked deceased.
1