Stop letting everyone be able to change my data on my tree
You need to STOP letting people go onto my tree and change my ACCURATE data with stuff they believe is true. I am sick and tired of having to check all my data each time I go on here to make sure it is still correct. I have actually stopped adding to my tree because there is no point if I can't trust that my information is still true when I return. If someone has new data, let them send it to me and let me DECIDE FOR MYSELF if I want to use it. Stop merging them automatically.
Answers
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Carole, you appear to have missed or ignored a crucial fact: the Family Tree on FamilySearch is an open-edit collaborative tree. In other words, there is no such thing here as "your tree" and "my tree". It's all our tree.
As with most things in life, a collaborative tree has both good parts and bad parts. If for you the bad parts outweigh the good, then you can use a non-collaborative genealogy platform, such as one of the individual-tree websites or offline software.
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It is indeed a collaborative tree... I do like the fact I can improve all the nonsense that creeps up in there. However Carole has an interesting point - there should be a better way to indicate what people believe vs what are actual facts. If you look at my additions everything has a source link (either church records or civil records). There should be a grading level, for example, a warning if you are changing a field which has a source attached, at minimum you should then add a source that contradicts / supersedes the existing source. This will definitely improve the quality of the tree.
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@Laurenz89, I'm afraid that mandatory sources or variations on same would not necessarily improve the tree: out of mistake or malice, people can and do attach incorrect sources. It's the same problem as with the various source-grading schemes that people propose: it doesn't matter whether a particular register entry is completely trustworthy, if it's about a different person. Every part of the process or structure is subject to error, and adding requirements will not change that.
I choose to look on the bright side: yes, people add errors, but open-edit means that I can fix it. People add errors to the individual-tree sites, too, and then those sites encourage new users to perpetuate those errors, and I can do nothing about any of it. I much prefer FS's setup.
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I don't have the patience to correct all the misspellings of my ancestors' names someone previously entered. After fixing my immediate family's information; realizing the rest of the tree already entered was full of errors and it would take longer to correct them than add in new; I'll put my energy in working on my family's trees in Ancestry.com.
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To reinforce Julia's comment about I can fix it:
Many years ago, a cousin of my maternal grandmother published his research on our Michel family, listing one of the earliest immigrants as Guillahume Michel, born in Brittany, France. That misspelled first name grates on my nerves every time I see it. The name, in French, is Guillaume. Guillaume began using the English version, William, once he settled in North America. And eventually, in my great-grandfather's generation, the surname morphed to Michael.
On a well-known site that supports individual family trees, there are some 216 trees using the Guillahume spelling.
On the FamilySearch tree, I edited the name to Guillaume many years ago, with an explanation. It's still Guillaume there today.
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I absolutely agree with Carole about other people adding stuff- people or facts that aren't true as I know them. Somehow, my grandparents had an extra child on this tree, whom I was totally unaware of. I have the original Webb family bibles and records, and know this to be false. And I can't figure out how to delete this false information. Very irritating! I might just delete the whole thing since the information is incorrect. On ancestry.com, my information stay set until I change it. Much better!
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Do you see the little pencil to the right of the names, @Margaret7,462? You can use that Edit button to make corrections/changes. If you want help, share the PIDs, and we can try to help.
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Completly agree with Carole, merge operatios should be much more strict in my opinion. Otherwise someone can easily overide my correct information without providing any sufficient reason and without me noticing. My suggestion:
- merge should only be possible when high percent of most important information (names, relationships, birth dates) matches
What do you think about that?
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Have you added your family members to your Following list? Then you will be quickly notified of any changes and can reverse them before too much time passes.
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A lady once accused me of highjacking her grandmother. She knew who her grandmother was and who her parents and children were and told me to fix my errors. Imagine how many people would jump on that bandwagon and slam me with insults!
Well, I looked at her sources, and they were good solid sources, but it was clear she never bothered to look at MY sources. My sources were also good solid sources. So I did what she failed to do. I researched the time and place where our ladies lived and found there were two women with the same name living in the same place at the same time. They were about 15 years apart, had different parents, and married different men, but they were alive at the same time. I replied to my accuser and told her about my findings, but I wasn't ugly or nor did I call her out for being rude. She was silent for several days and then messaged me back asking if I thought we were possibly related. (This was actually some years ago, before I knew about the relationship viewer.) Unfortunately the ladies with the same name shared an extremely common maiden name, and after we started collaborating we did not discover any relationship between our two lines in the last 200 years, anyway.
The moral of the story is don't jump to conclusions until you thoroughly research all sides.
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Yep, Carole. This contributes to genealogy mistakes going on forever, and/or each of us who is careful about what we put because we do due diligence in our work have to continually come here and correct the mistakes. And enough for me to consider highly taking my tree off this site. Today I found about 3 people deleted from my. This thing is not even functional. I think I'm done.
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Margaret7,462 Bibles often omitted children who died in infancy. I have added infants to family groups where there was solid evidence of an infant existing by that name, even though there is also solid evidence of another child born later having the same name. One of these family groups is documented in a German family bible dated from the early 1900s or possibly late 1800s and excludes a 1 month old infant clearly present in the passenger list of their arrival and the Ellis Island records. The Bible only has the son of the same name born 5 years later in the US.
To do genealogy properly, you need to research more to discover what really is the truth.
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Thank you to whichever mod it was who removed the shouting from this thread's title.
As I've said before: if you find that for you, the drawbacks of open-edit collaboration outweigh the benefits, then don't use FS's open-edit collaborative tree. Leave it to those of us who feel the opposite way. There are many alternatives available, such as Geni and WikiTree for variations on collaboration, and Ancestry and MyHeritage for non-collaborative genealogy.
All of the various online genealogy platforms are equally subject to error, and all of them make it easy for errors to be propagated far and wide. The difference on FS is that I, personally, can fix it, without needing to ask anyone's permission, or any other kind of block or obstacle in my way. I hope that this fact never changes.
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Ok but what if those people keep either omitting an Aunt I have altogether or listing her as dead WHICH SHE IS NOT as she lives close by me and I know for a fact that she is both alive and part of the family WHICH EVERYONE HERE SEEMS TO KEEP CHAINGING. So, maybe a lot of the facts are correct but I still want the option of accepting or deleting from MY tree - I, too, can go check on any info that is sent to me if my info is wrong but I want to be the one to keep my tree accurate not strangers.
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Even with the changes FaimilySearch appears ready to make, I don't think this will still meet your wishes. As has been stated, there is no "MY tree" concept to Family Tree. I have questioned myself, from time to time, about whether it is worth all the bother of working within an open-edit program like this, but decided that (for me) the advantages do outweigh the disadvantages. If this is not the case for you, maybe it would be better to just stick to what would truly be "your tree": a piece of software, located on your home computer, which nobody can interfere with.
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@CAROLE CALDWELL, I think one part of the problem is that you have misunderstood how FamilySearch handles profiles for living people: they are not public. They can only be seen if you're signed in with the account that entered the profile.
If you create a profile for your aunt and mark it "living", then only you will be able to see that profile. If someone signs in with a different account and looks at her parents (or other deceased relatives), she will not be listed. If someone else creates a profile for her and marks it "living", you will not be able to see that profile.
If someone creates a profile for your aunt and marks it "deceased", then that profile will be public, and you have two choices: you can use FS's internal messaging system to contact the user who created the profile to inform him or her of the error, or you can edit the death conclusion on the profile, change it to "living", and then follow the prompts to enlist an FS staff member's assistance in changing the status. Either way, the result of the correction will be that the profile disappears from your view.
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