Misinformation

CarolB1

Over and over and over I find that someone is adding names to my family tree that are not related. There should be a way to prevent that. It is misleading and is a complete falsehood. I thought the LDS church strived for accuracy. DNA has proven that there is no relationship, yet people go in and change the facts. This should be stopped.

Maile L

Family Tree is an open-edit common tree that all users work on together. If there are errors, you are invited to fix them. Here are a few articles from the Help Center that might be helpful.

The World’s Largest Shared Family Tree

How do I see what changes were made about a person in Family Tree?

How do I undo an incorrect change in Family Tree?

How do I undo a merge in Family Tree?

How do I correct parent-child relationships in Family Tree?

How can I prevent other people from making inaccurate changes to Family Tree?

Maile 🙂

dontiknowyou

@CarolB1 usually when a problem like this keeps happening, there is some mis-match of sources with profiles or another form of conflation that is causing incorrect hints. If you would like to share a profile ID or two, we may be able to spot the source of the problem and help you resolve it.

JohnDavis39

Fixing problems that are caused by someone with inaccurate information is impossible. The system is far too complicated. If I have several source documents that contradict someone who messed up my family tree I cannot seem to find a way to fix it or even to find who may have caused it. I found that in the change log that someone claimed that my GGG grandfather (John Davis) was the same person as their John Davis. So they merged them. Bingo . . . big problem. So I followed directions and restored the merge record. Nothing happened to my tree. All this software seems to do is perpetuate bad information. Why can't I just go in and at least re-build my tree? For an organization that I well respect and feel that they take genealogy very seriously I am quite surprised. I cannot stand to look at this incorrect family tree. When I have serious discussions with interested cousins and other relatives they often come back and say "that's not what your tree says on familysearch." It is embarrassing.

I live in Aiken SC and would like to know if you have a familysearc.com expert nearby that I can contract with to help me with these issues.

dontiknowyou

@JohnDavis39 rarely is the cause inaccurate information. Instead, it usually turns out to be a case of conflation. After you unmerged your ancestor and the other man with the same name, did you also remove all the other man's information from your ancestor's profile, and vice versa? This involves not only closely examining all attached sources on both profiles, but also all dates and places on the profile, and also all the attached profiles of first degree relatives.