People adding information who are "helpers" not family.
I am spending more time correcting information that is being added to the family tree that is wrong than I am searching for correct information.
I have had attachments made to the tree that have nothing to do with the family, its history or even where they have lived. These attachments have recently started, about the time the volunteer request went out.
Please,
Emphasize that a name is not the only factor for attaching someone or something to a tree. Place of birth, place of death, age, and where immediate family to the person have lived is important too. As are the census records. My grandmother, who lived her entire life in Nebraska, had an attachment to someone in South Africa? My grandfather was attached to a person in Colorado, unknown by any living relative. My grandfather lived in South Dakota...that year, the only thing that was alike was the date of death and the last name. My grandfathers burial record was already attached...now I must find it again.
Yes, I have one relative who is buried in Colorado, who was 8 at the time. She died when her mother was visiting the area. The mother, father, grandfather were buried in the Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota...her full brother was buried in Washington. Other relatives have been found in the Midwest region, NONE in Colorado with our last name, except the young girl.
It is very cumbersome and difficult to get rid of records and names that don't belong. I know people are only wanting to help, but helping should not include the ability to attach.
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You do not, in fact, need to find your grandfather's burial record again. If it was once attached as a source, then it's still there in the profile's change log, and you can restore it. Ditto for any conclusion that was changed.
When an indexed location is very wrong, such as South Africa instead of Nebraska, check whether that's the work of the autostandardization bot. You can recognize its additions to an indexed record by the presence of two event place fields. The one labeled with a parenthetical "Original" is what was actually indexed. The other one is what the computer picked out of the global places database to go with the indexed text. It sometimes got it spectacularly wrong, so we cannot accept any indexed location at face value on FS.
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I understand your frustration, but it also works in the opposite direction. I'm currently working on a family to which I am not related, disentangling and deconflating the work of a member of the family. Without regard for the dates of marriages, she assigned the children of the 1st marriage to the 2nd wife. Large family; I'll be at this for a while.
Not everyone is as careful as they might be, but, as Julia says, anything that was changed can be reversed. The change log is a good roadmap.
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I am trying to correct some information in my tree. A person in my tree has died and whoever added that info to the tree apparently added it somehow so it was issued a new ID. The ID in the tree does not show his wife or children and shows him still living. When I tried to merge the two IDs, the page read "cannot merge a dead person with a living person." How do I correct it so he once again has the family included?
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Simply correct the death status of the living version to deceased, and then merge the two profiles. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-merge-duplicates-in-family-tree-by-id
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@Dorothea Joslin, for privacy, profiles that are marked "living" are only visible to the account that entered them. Therefore, the version of this now-deceased person's profile that "does not show his wife or children and shows him still living" must be the version that you entered. It will, by nature and design, have a different ID than the version entered by any other user: the collaborative tree with its one-profile-per-person goal only applies to deceased people.
As Áine said, to merge your private profile with the public one, you simply need to edit the "Death" entry of the profile's Vitals box. Once you've changed that to "deceased", the profile will become public, and you'll be able to merge it with the other one.
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I'm with you. It is irritating to find that someone totally unrelated has added incorrect information or sources to an ancestors profile.
I've noticed that a lot of people are very sloppy in searching and adding data to someone's record. But it'snot just the passing stranger who finds some data and slaps it on your ancestor without fully thinking it through and looking at all the data. I recently found that an uncle had put a guy in as our great-geat-grandfather. The name and birth year were the same for the two people but that was all. The locations of every other event were on opposite sides of England. I spent a couple of hours breaking incorrect links and making the correct ones.
I once heard FS speaker say that one of the strengths of FS was that anyone could find data and make changes. She also said that one of the weaknesses of FS was that anyone could find data and make changes.
You can have dozens of researchers looking for data on some one. They can enter the data -- wrong or right -- into that person's record. I have learned that I have to keep my eye on ancestors of interest and evaluate (and maybe correct) any data and sources that have been added. It's kind of a pain, and you wish people were more careful, but I've never had anyone come back and claim their incorrect entries were valid.
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