Bulk detach
Someone detached records and profiles from people I've worked on. Is there an easy way to fix this or do I have to basically recreate everything? Is there a way of reporting the person?
Best Answer
-
I see there is a surname study in progress, which is wonderful. Apparently, G4T8-73X was intended as a placeholder, but was not clearly identified as such. I use placeholders myself, but only infrequently and only when other options have been exhausted. I could offer some suggestions, if you would like. Let me know.
Mostek, exact spelling, is rare, with just 5,355 historical records in FamilySearch. But if the spelling is not exact, FamilySearch returns over 170,000 historical records. So, does your project team have a handle on which names are spelling deviants or variants of this surname, and which are other surnames? This is an important issue of scope for any surname study. The Guild of One Name Studies discusses variants and deviants:
2
Answers
-
If you believe that the user who detached the records had malicious intent, you can report abuse.
If the detaching is a matter of a difference of opinion, you can try contacting the other user for a discussion. You can re-attach from the changelog of each individual.
2 -
can you provide the PID of the reocrd the records were detached from?
what type of records are you alluding to ? FS Memoires items? sources? what type of record?
0 -
Sorry for taking so long to respond. I helped work on Mostek and grouped a lot of Mosteks from the same part of Poland but someone else came along and detached profiles and records from profiles. They appear 83 times on the recent changes page. The records are baptism records and list the parents and children. G4T8-73X
0 -
Looking at just the top two entries in the changelog, I agree 100% with the user who detached those relationships: the same person cannot be the parent of people born in 1774 and 1860.
I think it boils down to a disagreement or misunderstanding about how the communal family tree works. Attaching relevant sources to everyone you find with a particular surname is good and commendable, but attaching a generic father to all of them, regardless of how far apart they are in time and space, serves no useful purpose and may even count as abuse in some people's minds. It certainly bears no relation to reality, and the Tree is supposed to be for real people, not imaginary or fictitious ones.
4 -
In my personal opinion, the collection of everyone with the same surname to start a statistical analysis of who everyone is and working to collect them in family groups belongs in a private spreadsheet, not in Family Tree. A very useful feature of Family Tree is the ability to export search results into a spreadsheet that includes links back to each entry in the website. That allows you to sort and shuffle by names, dates, and places to start building theories about how people are connected. It is only after firm, proven conclusions are established that those conclusions, with all the associated sources and proofs, should be compiled in Family Tree.
To create dozens of family relationships, 99% percent of which are going to need to be deleted eventually, just makes a mess of the change log and causes massive confusion for other researchers who have to wonder why anyone ever put people born over 100 years apart as siblings. There are too many existing conflated families from past users incorrectly merging unrelated people which some researchers are working hard to untangle to create more of them.
If working in Family Tree gives resources that are helpful in a surname project, emptying your list of people followed and marking all the people with the surname of interest as Following will give a list of up to 4000 people to work on without creating a fictitious father for them.
4 -
I do have to add that it does appear that this other user went to far, for example in this change log: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/changelog/G4TZ-4YC
Here a person's profile was created from a source that included christening date and place and both parents. That other user deleted the child from the parents listed in the source without giving any reason. Now that child is floating in Family Tree without any parents or any other relationships.
I don't know anything about name frequencies in small regions of Poland, but it does look, on first glance that the family group for this child, with parents and siblings could well have been correctly done with no need to chop all the children out of the family.
1 -
I expect the person who removed all the children from the placeholder profile wasn't paying a lot of attention while doing it and detached children from some other families. But it is also possible that this person was intentionally detaching children systematically and didn't even recognize one "parent" was a placeholder. Without a lot of searching and analysis it is hard to make any conclusion about their intentions.
I began a new discussion of placeholder profiles more generally:
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/134848/placeholder-profiles-good-and-bad
1
