Make it Harder to Delete Relationships with Sources
Problem: experienced researchers add sources to relationships in Family Tree, and then less experienced researchers may come along and remove the relationship without actually reviewing the sources (even though the tool to Remove/Replace parents/spouses requires people to state that they've reviewed all available sources). Once the less experienced research has made the change, all the information about the relationship disappears (sources, notes, etc.), creating a lot of work to restore the info that was previously documented.
Solution: require people to detach all sources from a relationship before they can delete the relationship. That would actually force people to look at the available sources for the relationship before making their change. It would also encourage researchers to better document relationships.
Comments
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I don't have time to test this right now, but I believe that if you use the profile's Change Log to restore a relationship, the sources will be restored with it.
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I feel like I should just delete my tree on here. Someone has connected people to it that definitely don't belong. Some of the male members of my Lee family have done Y-DNA testing to confirm our lineage and we definitely aren't connected to John Scholar Lee and his family. Our John Lee was connected wrongly to that family years ago probably via Huxford genealogy. One day I might try to fix it. I think I did before but some well meaning person changed it back.
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There seems to be a bug, at least in beta: the change log thinks the relationship source is "current",
but there's no sign of it in the restored relationship's popup.
I think I'll go post this in the New Person Page group as a bug report.
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Like many other Family Tree users, you appear to misunderstand the way the program works. You do not have what you refer to as "my tree", so cannot delete any branch or individual unless you are the sole person who has added detail to the profile(s).
It is very common to experience similar problems to those you have encountered, so you (like all of us) have to decide whether Family Tree is suitable for your needs in maintaining records that are liable to be be amended by any other user. (This includes that creation of false relationships, of course.)
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I just by coincidence found someone had attached 20 sources to the wrong connection. I don't have the time to detach the 20 sources so I messaged the person to detach them. I made the correct connections. The person used the indexes and was doing click click genealogy. attach a source to everyone available. All the sources have to be renamed so you have a clue what the source is all about, Without renaming the sources they just become a bunch of clutter; that someone has to take the time to unclutter, because the people who create clutter don't have a clue. To compound the problem the indexes in this country are very poorly done. I seen someone create a person from the index, only problem, the surname was a his occupation.
There needs to be wiki pages to explain the basics, so people can be directed to a place where the process can be explained. Otherwise it will become a click click genealogy without integrity. It wouldn't be a bad idea for someone to complete a simple course before jumping in and doing genealogy. Sounds like a job for the missionaries.
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It's hard enough to convince individual researchers that some connection was made in error. It's that much harder when multiple gedcoms exist in multiple databases that contain the same wrong connection. In my case, a marriage was incorrectly attributed to my ancestor when it was the marriage of another couple who coincidentally had the same names. This error has even shown up in a published book which, interestingly enough, contains no sources whatsoever. I had high hopes for the shared tree but until people are challenged to actually add documentation, I don't see how this will ever work.
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