Research Help is not helpful
These are obvious "Research Help" suggestions.
Yes -- a couple MAY be married, if they do not have children every other year there MAY be missing children, if one spouse dies 3-4-5 years before the other there MAY be another spouse, if a male or female is over age 16 and does not have a spouse listed there MAY be a spouse,...
For me these are "Research Helps" that are taking up valuable realestate on the Person Page at the risk of loosing sight of real source helps or duplicates. They provide little to no value added to the person's page.
Answers
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If you want to reclaim the Research Help real estate - click on the chevron to collapse it:
The new person page will then remember you collapsed it and not open that real estate - unless you click on the inverted chevron again (or at least that is how it is behaving currently for me). This is an account setting - not a session setting - so it remembers what you have collapsed even if you logout and login later. It even just survived my clearing FamilySearch cookies/cache. So your account preferences must be loaded from the server when you login or else that script doesn't clear everything from your account (obviously) - sometime I'll have to investigate what it does clear.
That should leave more room for the cards you do value to be more visible.
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Thanks for taking the time to provide some insight.
Yes -- the Research Helps can be collapsed ... but this is where unattached sources appear, which I find very valuable. I keep them so as not to loose source hints.
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I see. Sorry for not helping.
Perhaps the new home page hints will be of help: https://www.familysearch.org/en/home/tasks/
This provides a list of Record hints for profiles you are related to. Maybe this will be useful rather than browsing to each profile to view hints?
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mod note - some posts were edited for code violations
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I find the RESEARCH HELPS somewhat insulting. They state only what is obvious to me, and take up real estate on the page that could be used for something else .....
Person May Have Children - The person is 15 or older but has no spouse or children listed.
Couple May Have Children - There is evidence of the marriage but no children are listed.
Person May Have Another Spouse - There is no evidence of another marriage, but this person lived long enough after the last spouse passed away to marry again.
Possible Missing Child - There is a gap of 3 or more years between the birth of one child and the next sibling.
You could add: Person is 15 years of age or older and could have children. ... and many more.
We could look forever and never find any of these. They are suggestions, but other than an observation, have no basis for the individual to which they are attached and could cause people to spend countless hours searching for something they might thing FamilySearch has some unique insight into.
Remove them or provide a way to turn these hints off. (And only these hints, not the sources that appear in the same field!)
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It is very easy to click on one of the research helps and hit dismiss. Then the hint goes away. I do this often when I have researched the person and found no more children or other marriages, etc.
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FamilySearch seems to make a really good effort at keeping in the mind the varying skill levels of their millions of users around the word. These research helps are likely of great value to some of them. And they are good reminders to all of us to double check our research and make sure we have not overlooked something.
If you have fully completed all research to be absolutely sure that the research suggestion has been fully dealt with and does not apply, then, as Cindy suggested, just dismiss it.
Have you ever watched RootsTech presentation put on by various employees of FamilySearch? They are all quite nice people and very dedicated to their work. I don't think you would use the tone of voice you use in your post with any of them if you were meeting in person. I understand that, unfortunately, it has become quite common practice on internet comment boards to be rather rude and demanding, but that really is not needed here in this community.
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Unlike Gordon, I do not view Richard's comments as possibly representing an attack on any FamilySearch employees. True, I would have phrased some of these points rather differently myself. However, on the general issue, I do find some of these suggestions to be patronising to experienced researchers and likely to cause unnecessary worries for those with little experience with genealogy.
There definitely is a direction for us to check for quite unlikely events, particularly concerning the birth of children to women who, technically, remain of child-bearing age, but for whom, medically, the chances of giving birth of considerably low - in, say, their late forties and early fifties. (I believe 52 is the age to which FamilySearch considers it reasonable to offer this suggestion.) The hint relating to the 3-year gap between children is equally silly, as (a) in years gone by, children were regularly miscarried / died at birth, and (b) the same can happen today, as well as there now being quite a likelihood of such a gap due to "family planning" considerations.
We know from suggestions relating to "possible duplicates" that inexperienced users are quite likely to treat "possible" as "fact" when seeing something put by an authoritative source, viz. "FamilySearch". Likewise, if a missing spouse or child is hinted, a lot of unnecessary effort could be undertaken by an inexperienced user in trying to prove that was the case, whereas an experienced user would calmly consider everything being possible, but not need the prompting of any of these "research helps", which they might actually find quite patronising.
Of course, I can see many users will see the positive side of such "helps", or even find them completely harmless and easy to dismiss. However, on balance, I think I would be personally rather happy to see them disappear - or at least the case for excluding many of the "sillier" ones, and the keeping of any remaining "research helps" to a bare minimum.
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I have been researching my family history for about 10 years, but just recently began entering data into the familysearch site because I want to be very certain about what I publish. Oh sure, in some cases it the suggestions are cringe-worthy. But in several cases, they have been enormously helpful.
In one case, I connected three young children, all in the small church graveyard to which the family was connected. None of the little one lived at the time of a census. The inscriptions hooked up well, "son of J & S Davis," and in my mind the connection was solidified by the grave of their grandson in the same spot (that certainty supported by Civil War widow's pension papers.)
In another instance prompted by the record hints, I thought about it, and now have a strong hunch about an infant buried in an enormous cemetery with what might be his mother (who died 4 years later at age 33, survived by a 6 year old) and grandmother, but the infant is not in the same lot of the cemetery. The gravestone says "infant of R Davis, which means I need to probe. Had it said infant of R & M Davis, I be very tempted scoop him up.
My point is that I, and perhaps others, may consider these suggestions. I'm glad they are there and that no one deleted them. In the early 1800, a whole bunch of folks all faiths had children.
I also wish folks would consider the record hints very, very carefully before kidnapping a different family's offspring.
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Like Paul, I would not be at all averse to these suggestions going away forever, but I can live with mostly just ignoring/dismissing them.
The ones I find inexplicable (and therefore frustrating) are the ones suggesting a possible re-marriage when only one spouse has a death date. It'll say something like "she lived long enough to marry again" -- when, in fact, it is entirely possible that she predeceased her husband, or died the following week. In other words, the "she lived long enough" claim is basically false, because we don't know how long she lived. Why is this suggestion offered in this situation?
The "possible missing child" suggestion is sometimes useful -- I don't enjoy arithmetic. (That's why I got a degree in math.) It'd be more useful if it were somewhat more precise, though. I just tested it in the beta: if Child A has a birthdate of 31 Dec 1904, and Child B has a birthdate of 1 Jan 1908, then it makes the suggestion. If, however, Child A has a birthdate a day later (1 Jan 1905) or Child B has a birthdate a day earlier (31 Dec 1907), then the suggestion goes away. In other words, the algorithm is going strictly by the year.
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The one that makes me roll my eyes, sometimes, is the possible missing child, when a woman has had 14 children in 20 years, with 2 sets of twins. Maybe, just maybe, she deserved a short break.
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Mod note - Code violations have been edited, again. Please see see the Community Code of Conduct for more details. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/community-code-of-conduct
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