Allow deletions for no source, no vitals, and no real name
I added a name, based on a genealogist's well sourced find, and was suddenly saddled with many generations of ancestors and alleged ancestors, some very suspect because of poor data. Many could be truncated if I were able to delete a woman with no information, and only listed as "Mrs. Joe Blow." I don't see why Mr. and Mrs. are options for titles, and I hope I am correct in changing her name to 'unknown.' If there is at least a first name that is good, I have sources that show only a wife's first name, but then again, I list that source.
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If the name of a person is not known, unknown is not the form preferred for use in the FSFT.
Avoid words that are not names. Examples include not named, unnamed, Mister, Wife, twin, or son. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-to-enter-names-in-family-tree
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There is a problem once someone has added a (unknown) name in the format described. The same applies to those "?" IDs that were carried across to Family Tree from earlier FamilySearch programs. I, like many other users, do not create a spouse where their details are totally unknown, but once another user ("FamilySearch" in the case of the "?" examples) has created a name in a "wrong" format, just what do we change it to?
The only current option (as we can't delete it) would be to detach the relationship - e.g., remove a "?" or "Mrs Joe Blow" from a spousal relationship, but I have been advised previously not to do this. (Even though a "person" with no clues on identity should not have any sources attached, of course).
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I came across a family this week where a previous contributor had added 5 "unknown" children to a family based on the mother's declaration in the census that she had had 5 children before 1910. I had the baptismal records for the children of the mother's previous marriage and spent quite a bit of time merging each unknown into the known children.
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The only current option (as we can't delete it) would be to detach the relationship - e.g., remove a "?" or "Mrs Joe Blow" from a spousal relationship, but I have been advised previously not to do this.
I wouldn't heed that advice at all. If there's no sources and no information, there should be no spouse or placeholder. It's just a doorway for bad assumptions. Most of the time I see it, it's with a guessed birthdate and a child's birthplace as theirs and a marriage date of one year before the first known child.
If it's a woman and the family has more than one child, that's an assumption that the father had only one wife who bore all his children. I don't want that in the tree unless there's evidence for it. If her name is entered as "Mrs. Smith", that's an assumption they were married, and that she took his name, which isn't culturally universal.
The only time I'll ever add a placeholder is if a sibling relationship is known, but nothing about the parents, and I hate that that's the only real way to establish a that relationship here.
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but I have been advised previously not to do this.
The reason for this advice and request is that there is a high likelihood of associated Temple data that is only visible to people with church membership accounts. Deleting the relationship messes up that data in Family Tree. So please continue to respect that request.
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Now I remember you did explain that to me some time ago, Gordon.
No, I never want to do anything that might adversely affect ordinances / Temple work, but do find it difficult to get my head around work that's been carried out for an individual who can't be identified by name - i.e., those (nearly always women, I guess) effectively called "Unknown" or "?".
I assume the policy has changed now, thus allowing for a spouse's name to be omitted altogether (from Family Tree) when it is totally unknown.
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Expecting users to avoid altering data they're not allowed to see is a bit like expecting people to avoid stepping on the invisible flowers planted on the sidewalk. There's tons of mistakes on those older profiles, even ones that do have sources. I've run across way, way too many incorrect merges, children attached to the wrong parents, profiles that were hijacked and turned into different individuals or couples, names changed on ten year-old profiles -- not a word of warning anywhere about doing that. I can't imagine somebody performing a ceremony to bind people for eternity they weren't absolutely certain they were ever actually together in the first place.
Because of the way profiles were mass-generated from records a decade ago, I've also often had to merge a dozen profiles with ? spouses. Is the expectation that we merge all the question marks too? Why would we do that if we're not sure they were all the same individual? Or do we leave them all, and pretend every child had a different mother? It just doesn't make sense to push the burden of a such a design flaw back on a user base that can't even see how their edits affect it.
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"The only current option (as we can't delete it) would be to detach the relationship - e.g., remove a "?" or "Mrs Joe Blow" from a spousal relationship, but I have been advised previously not to do this. ..."
I wouldn't detach that sort-of-placeholder from a relationship for the simple reason that if I did, there'd be a sort-of-placeholder profile floating around for all eternity with no clue where they came from (OK, FamilySearch ninjas can get that clue from the profile's history, but not everyone can do that).
"... Even though a "person" with no clues on identity should not have any sources attached, of course."
I beg to differ - what about baptisms where only the child and father are named? There's no clue about the mother's identity, but there is a very valid source to be attached - that for the baptism of the child. There are 2 ways of dealing with such a baptism - no mother at all after creating the child or a place-holder mother. I don't think there's any obvious guidance on this? Biologically speaking, I strongly suspect that there was a mother... 😉
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I wouldn't detach that sort-of-placeholder from a relationship for the simple reason that if I did, there'd be a sort-of-placeholder profile floating around for all eternity with no clue where they came from (OK, FamilySearch ninjas can get that clue from the profile's history, but not everyone can do that).
What would be the harm in that? We're talking about an unsourced profile with no information -- there's probably hundreds of thousands already in the system like that. No (sourced, reliable) information is being lost.
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No (sourced, reliable) information is being lost [if the sort-of-placeholder profile floating around for all eternity with no clue where they came from]
Depends what you believe your task should be. If you believe your task is to catalogue snippets of data, then such placeholders can indeed be dismissed / ignored / forgotten about.
My working assumption is that there was, in the vast majority of cases, a real person behind that placeholder. My own personal view is that I'm supposed to be honouring these people by remembering or recording them. Disconnecting them is (close to) destroying information about them, condemning them to float around in limbo.
What I do find frustrating is that information can be hidden from us non-Church members that might hint at who or what these people were. @Gordon Collett mentions in the context of disconnecting placeholders that
... there is a high likelihood of associated Temple data that is only visible to people with church membership accounts. Deleting the relationship messes up that data in Family Tree.
Fair enough - I'm not asking for access but a "verbal" request like this isn't likely to be very successful. Maybe the relationship should be "protected" with an error message of "Relationship cannot be deleted as LDS Temple data depends on this relationship".
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"Relationship cannot be deleted as LDS Temple data depends on this relationship".
And what happens when that relationship is quite wrong? Not referring, in my case, to an unknown, but when someone guesses at the lineage, gets it quite wrong, and takes it to Temple. One cousin branch in my paternal family converted, decided our Louth, Ireland RC ancestors were from Wales of and CofE, and took those names to Temple based on an erroneous guess.
Another cousin branch converted, and her husband is a Bishop. He adds wrong names to the family on a regular basis.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile asks - "what happens when that relationship is quite wrong?"
Good question! What happens now when relationships are altered radically? I've no idea because I can't see that data.
I was responding to @Gordon Collett's
... there is a high likelihood of associated Temple data that is only visible to people with church membership accounts. Deleting the relationship messes up that data in Family Tree.
Gordon didn't request us not to change any relationship. Presumably, if someone changed your umpteen GF from Dai Jones to Patrick O'Riley (an unlikely change, I know), this sort of, somehow, filters through to the Church's record of your ancestral line and everything is OK because it's now correct. Or more correct than before.
But cutting someone completely adrift so that they become an isolated profile, sounds more like it causes a mess up???? So much so, that those who can see that data would really rather we didn't. (Except non-Church members have no means of knowing this...)
Bear in mind that the context of where we started was with placeholder profiles that had no name (or no meaningful name) and no meaningful data. The sort of profile that, frankly, could be anyone. I personally would rather work with that placeholder profile, which surely must have meant something once upon a time, and merge them into the correct person. The alternative appears to be to cut them off and send them into limbo for all eternity. And yes, I have sat there merging half a dozen "? ?" placeholder dummies created because the half a dozen baptisms had no mother listed but they were indexed with a placeholder mother and someone created placeholder profiles in FSFT. No, it shouldn't have happened - but it did.
If (and it's a big if) there are several ways to deal with these placeholders (there usually are) and one way messes up LDS data while another doesn't, I'd rather be told which causes issues. If it's possible to tell. That was the reason for my suggestion.
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I will frankly admit there are no easy answers here. But I am always a fan of always asking, "Why?" (Why is this mother represented by a question mark?) and not just taking hasty action (I don't like question marks so I'll just chop it off! Bye!). This does often mean digging into the complete history of FamilySearch, its prior databases (such as the fact the original bases could only have either husband - wife or parents - child linking in a single record with no other type of family connections, not even more than one child per set of parents.), and now obsolete required standards.
For example, those question marks were not in any database prior to Family Tree. In previous databases the single line entries were just father - child. According to Ron Tanner, project manager of Family Tree, when those databases were imported into Family Tree, the Family Tree program did not allow that father-child structure for those particular records and required something be put for the mother and they chose the ? as being easily understood in all languages.
I too have spent a lot of time searching census records, marriage records and death records to identify who these ? mothers are and putting in their correct names. I've also spent hours taking constructing complete families from the multiple isolated parents - child single line entries from what was a state of the art 1970s database that did not allow family grouping. Family Tree did not open as a blank slate. It contains 129 years of research done under different requirements and expectations. That is why we have so much cleaning up to do which we should do with respect to the efforts of people who were doing their best with what they had to work with over 100 years ago.
Do I expect all users of Family Tree to ever know any of this? No. Do I expect users to be able to take any care with data they cannot see? No. Do I expect all users to ask questions and learn when they see something they don't understand? Yes.
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My working assumption is that there was, in the vast majority of cases, a real person behind that placeholder.
Nobody is removing a placeholder because they think no mother was involved in the birth of a child. I remove them because I can't be sure one mother was involved in the birth all the family's children. There's a certain hubris required to look at a father with ten children attached, no marriage record or mothers' names on any birth record and declare that that information void can be filled with exactly one person who will now be spiritually linked
My own personal view is that I'm supposed to be honouring these people by remembering or recording them. Disconnecting them is (close to) destroying information about them, condemning them to float around in limbo.
I do that by not making assumptions about the family I don't know are true -- by making what's in the tree as accurate to known information as possible, which includes making the tree clearly and honestly reflect the information we don't know. It's not as severe, but maddening in the same way people copying illegitimately sourced info from Ancestry Trees, Find a Grave or Geni here (and the lack of official pushback to that) is: it disrespects the actual individuals the profiles represent -- it's just pouring a kind of genealogical slurry into the gaps and pretending that assumptions and fiction are as valid as fact.
A ? profile isn't the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It's not a shrine to all the unknown mothers. It's not a person. It's a technological kludge that happened a decade ago because our ancestors were too misogynistic to bother with the name of the women propagating the human race, and some software briefly had problems dealing with that. I just don't see how slapping a "?" bandage over the scars of that honors those people.
Ultimately, regardless of what your personal beliefs are, nothing affects the actual person or people those profiles represent. A seal isn't broken because somebody loses the paperwork. At absolute worse, somebody accidentally performs the ceremony again; if that's an issue, they're going to need to find a software solution for it on their side, because this is definitely not the only place where spouses with minimal information get disconnected.
If it was actually critical that those profiles not be disturbed, why is the extent of that knowledge just a vague memory discussed among four or five people on a chatboard that 99.9% of the users never read? Why plaster every name box with an error message that "?" in name fields are forbidden, then claim profiles that are just "?" are essential to preserve? We've asked for clearer guidelines on this stuff for years -- if it's essentially that we handle this a certain way, where is are written, public-facing guidelines for how to handle it, how to handle merges with multiple "?" spouses, etc. I've probably disconnected a few thousand of those profiles in the eight years I've been here -- my Contributions show at least 200 just in the past month -- and have never heard a peep about it.
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Getting back to the actual initial post:
Mr/Mrs. should not be used. That's been quite settled on this board, though still lacking in the user-facing guidelines.
Last names should be left blank. No married names, no "unknown" or anything like that. That too has been answered here but not in blah blah blah.
If only a first name is known, use just the first name.
The situation where nothing is known has been asked a few times and, to my knowledge, never concretely or officially answered.
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@RTorchia said
"There's a certain hubris required to look at a father with ten children attached, no marriage record or mothers' names on any birth record and declare that that information void can be filled with exactly one person"
Personally, I could justify that reduction to one profile by saying that the profile represents unknown data and the unknown aspect includes a lack of knowledge about how many real-life humans sat behind that placeholder profile. However, that's perhaps not obvious and while I do it on my (unconnected to FS) desktop database, I'm less likely to do it in FS FamilyTree. I certainly wouldn't alter profiles just to do that - I'd much rather find out who the unknowns were.
"We've asked for clearer guidelines on this stuff for years -- if it's essentially that we handle this a certain way, where is are written, public-facing guidelines for how to handle it, how to handle merges with multiple "?" spouses, etc."
Totally agree with you on this. We shouldn't be relying on gut feeling, knowledge that may not be correct, or the experience of a few people who are good enough to record their views.
And I completely agree with your advice about names. The only thing I'd add is that what applies to the creation of a profile is not necessarily quite as applicable to dealing with an already created profile that didn't follow that advice.
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No married names, no "unknown" or anything like that. That too has been answered here but not in blah blah blah.
That IS answered in the How to Enter Names guidelines.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile No, not quite.
"Last Names—Enter the family name or surname. If a woman changed her surname after marriage, enter her maiden name. If the person has no last name, leave the Last Name field blank."
It says what to do if married and maiden names are known, and what to do if the person has no last name, but it doesn't say to leave it blank if the maiden name is unknown even if the married name is known. That's what I'd like to see to avoid the "Mrs. Smith" situation: explicit instructions to leave it blank and not add the title and married name. On the Vital Info surname field itself, I'd like to see one word added: If female, use maiden name only.
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Maybe you missed this part
Avoid words that are not names. Examples include not named, unnamed, Mister, Wife, twin, or son.
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No Áine, I didn't miss that part, it's just not relevant because a married surname is not a "word that is not a name" -- it's a name.
The center of the page includes the instruction: Title—Use Title for words like “Count” or “Mister.” which kind of takes the wind of the sails of "mister" in the "avoid" example later. And "avoid" itself is a weak verb, like using "may" instead of "must" -- it's a suggestion that implies it's acceptable to do if there's no other choice, like, one might imagine, when you only know the married name and not the maiden name.
Plus the whole article never once addresses the possibility that the information is unknown and how to manage that. Even the list of not-name example words doesn't include "unknown", which has to be one of the most common non-name words used in those fields.
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