Sources for Family Search supplied data
Most of the individuals and data for this family (9Q67-89P) were created by Family Search. However, absolutely no source data was provided. I think that it is great to create families and family relationships, to add dates and events, etc. However, they have to come from somewhere. Please add the source(s) from which the data was taken. Thank you.
Answers
-
When you see records that appear to have been created by FamilySearch in 2012 you are usually gaining the wrong impression. These records were almost certainly created by an individual user prior to the date shown and migrated to Family Tree from a now defunct program.
As you can see, there are sources available to be attached, including those relating to the 1822 birth /christening. However, I am often unable to attach sources (apart from manual notes) for many of the IDs I have created as, for many areas / time periods, there are just no records available online. Of course a further problem can be in an individual having many sources attached, but most applying to another person of similar identity.
So, whilst it is important to attach sources where available, (1) they can be very difficult to locate and (2) if attached, they should be thoroughly examined to ensure they are providing evidence relating to that particular individual.
4 -
Family Tree contains all of the family history data contributed to FamilySearch from its start in 1894 as the Genealogical Society of Utah through the spring of 2012 when Family Tree opened. The older data systems used through the years did not have the capacity to include sources and either did not contain the contributor's names or did not have permission to share contributors names. Anything you see with "FamilySearch" as the contributor, with very few exceptions, came from those older systems. that is why they do not include sources.
The quickest way to identify these older submissions to FamilySearch is to look at the very first entry in a person's Change Log. If it says FamilySearch with a date in the spring of 2012, then that data was imported from an older system. If you do see a source in that 2012 import it will be labeled as a Legacy source and will be a source entered by a user of New Family Search, the system that just preceded Family Tree.
For an in depth discussion of this, see this webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQyI-HATSAI
2 -
Without contradicting any other possible explanation, I want to mention that FamilySearch also used some European record collections to populate Family Tree with tiny seed trees of mom, dad, child, but the records were not attached as sources. It was left to contributors to attach sources and in the process merge duplicates. Typically if, say, a couple had 10 children there would be at least 10 duplicate profiles of each parent.
1 -
@dontiknowyou, those index-based twiglets are also legacy data, imported from a previous system. That is, they're no more FS-created than any of the other legacy data. It's not exactly clear to me what user input was involved in the creation of these entries, but based on the fact that in the Hungarian indexes, there aren't twiglets for every index entry, and that the entries that do have them are almost always female baptisms, I'm pretty sure there was some sort of LDS church activity (I kind of want to say "voodoo") involved.
2 -
And those twiglets were not just created from European collections. Those twiglets were created for many RC records in the USA.
2 -
The many collections of extracted records, the predecessor of indexing, that are some of what @dontiknowyou is referring to actually do have sources attached. They will be in this form:
These records originally came from the Community Contributed portion of the International Genealogical Index, one of the older databases imported into Family Tree. A reason for many of the duplicates in Family Tree is that often these extracted records were also put in the Vital Records Index and this VRI was also imported into Family Tree.
2 -
And not to contradict @dontiknowyou, but to rephrase his comment, it is not that the tree was "seeded" with these child/parent triplets or husband/wife couplets, it is just that that is how the original database was structured.
Here is one page, out of many hundreds of thousands, of the old IGI microfiche:
Each line here is an independent record not linked to any other record. This was a very simple, you could say, database. Each individual line here was imported into Family Tree. To take the very last line, George Berry born 1722, here is the corresponding Family Tree record: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/MHBS-3XX
This is a pretty clear cut example because it has not been modified since being imported in the initial creation of Family Tree. It does have a corresponding extraction record source so that is attached.
Records in the IGI that were not a community extraction project but rather were submitted by one individual would not have a source because those were not included in these older systems.
2 -
Just to add one more item to the history lesson, here is how you added information to "Family Tree" in 1926:
Note that this does contain source information, but these source citations were not transcribed into the first computerized version of this information and so the initial import into Family Tree in 2012 did not contain these sources as can be seen in the Change Log. Here is the corresponding Family Tree entry today: https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LHVN-WXS Some of this variety of records were linked into family groups when first converted to electronic form. But as with all these records, this was not created by FamilySearch. In this case it was a single individual whose name and address do appear on another part of this family group sheet.
(Totally off topic but historically interesting is to see that this submission did follow the strictly enforced place name standard of the 1920s. This points out one of the problems with trying to set and mandate a standard in genealogy. One time's reasonable logic becomes another's foolishness. The current practice of encouraging historically accurate place names and linking them to a standard that can be changed whenever changing circumstances require a modification of the standard is a really great innovation. It does look like this old standard was required because of the limitation of the form. Looking at the lines for the children, you just could not type in more than Nthr for the country. You can see in the Change Log that this couple's marriage place was imported into Family Tree as Harlingen, Frslnd., Nthr. His birth place did get expanded to be fully spelled out sometime between this record and the form of it imported into Family Tree)
3 -
(I would edit the above but don't want to risk losing the image.)
Do keep in mind that this conversion from paper to computer was taking place in the 1970s on computer systems that were far more limited than what we have today in terms of processing power and storage capability.
1
