Creator of person page
Where do you find in the person page the entity who originally created it?
Best Answers
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The person who submitted the original entry can be found under "Latest Changes" This is on the left-hand side of the Detail Page. Click on "Show All" Scroll through changes to see who did changes and find original entry. If you know exactly what you are looking for, you can filter at the top of the page. Or go straight to bottom of screen. If it is dated 2012/2013, it came from our other system.
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FamilySearch does not create the person page.
When Family Tree first opened in 2012, the Family Tree person pages were set up by taking the data of past styles of "person pages" from various FamilySearch databases such as the International Genealogical Index, the Ancestral File, the Pedigree Resource File, the Temple Bureau Index file, and the New FamilySearch database which contained all the person profile information submitted by researchers and various extraction projects between 1894 and 2012. If you see FamilySearch as the "contributor" in the very earliest entry in the Change Log, that means a user of FamilySearch sometime between 1894 and 2012 created the profile. FamilySearch just copied it into Family Tree.
These pre-2012 person pages, which generally were just one line in a spreadsheet-like database did not include the original contributor or sources so it can range from hard to impossible to track down those. You can read other discussions about this topic here: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/518406#Comment_518406
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Thank you, Gordon! I tried to visit the discussion where my original comment about sources was posted only to find "This discussion has been closed." So everything from my comment on (including what you and Paul W wrote) is gone. Where did it go? Fortunately, I printed it out in its entirety. I will post my response here as it does address creation of the person page.
Thank you again to Paul W and Gordon Collectt, who contributed thoughts and information regarding my comment about the creation of multiple profiles (person pages as FamilySearch terms it) for the same person, and attributing it to FamilySearch, among other issues.
I am not new to FamilySearch, but I am not proficient, nor knowledgeable, in using the many features of this comprehensive program. First, I printed out all the responses to my comment in the Community Discussion “Sources attached too many times”. I included the previous discussions beginning in 2020. Seven people participated in the discussions. I found Godon Collett’s summarization to be valuable; particularly in explaining the extraction program and IGI and PRF. I knew nothing about them.
To answer Paul W’s request for clarification of my main complaint, I had to do some research to clarify it to myself. First of all, did I know the various ways person pages could be created and where would I find the creator named? Paul had stated that FamilySearch does not create person pages. So, why had I reached that assumption? I was unsuccessful in a general search for “where do you find the name of who created a person page.” Then I returned to the Community and asked the question, “where do you find in the person page the entity who originally created it?” Within less than 45 minutes I had the Best Answer. By that time, I had read Gordon Collectt’s comment and looked for duplicate person pages not yet processed. There I found (in the Changes section) original entries titled “Relationship added” by FamilySearch, which were dated for during 2012. So, in essence, FamilySearch did, through extraction, I believe, create that person page. Then in Changes for another duplicate person page, I found “person added” as the first posting with the name of the person who created this.
Other issues in my comment were about multiple sources that seem to be duplicated. It is the proverbial searching for a needle in a haystack to determine which sources are exactly alike. The best method seems to be accepting them all. The results of merging with regard to increasing the number of sources in a person page is unavoidable.
Further comments:
I have found it very easy to create a duplicate person page, even with careful checking; then discovering later that several person pages exist for that same person, usually associated with a birth/baptism for each of multiple children and the parent’s names are spelled slightly different, have a middle name, or a variety of patronymic naming patterns, etc.
People who do the indexing can and do mistranslate the information in the original record.
Merging often reveals other duplicate person pages for people in the relationship and creates the need for more merges.
Recently FamilySearch has been advising of specific sources that have been updated.
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Here's a few additional thoughts about your comments just for general interest.
In essence, FamilySearch did, through extraction, I believe, create that person page.
In that sense, I'll agree with you. Most people on these boards have asked this question to mean, "Why did a FamilySearch employee sit down in April 2012 and create a new, often duplicate, profile by typing in incomplete, unsourced information in Family Tree?" That FamilySearch did not do. If instead the question is, did FamilySearch have a large group of volunteers take parish registers and go through them line by line to extract birth and marriage information then put that information into a huge database starting in 1969 by creating line entries for each birth or marriage then transfer that information into Family Tree in 2012 to create a Family Tree profile, then the answer would be "Yes."
One thing to keep in mind, is that the IGI contained both these extraction records and records submitted by individual researchers about their ancestors and relatives. You can tell the difference because extraction records that ended up in the IGI will actually always have a source. Extracted records that ended up in the Pedigree Resource file and researcher submitted records will not.
Since you are not familiar with the IGI, here is what it looked like in the days it existed on microfiche:
If an IGI entry came from a FamilySearch sponsored extraction project, this is the source it will have on it:
These days indexing projects stay in the historical record databases created from the project until a researcher finds that information about a relative and adds it to Family Tree.
Other issues in my comment were about multiple sources that seem to be duplicated. It is the proverbial searching for a needle in a haystack to determine which sources are exactly alike. The best method seems to be accepting them all.
Sources that have different URLs, even if they otherwise look identical, are viewed by FamilySearch as different sources and we have been asked to attach all of them. This does put a lot of sources on a person, but it also allows a person's Sources page to act as a table of contents or an index to the historical record databases. You can look at attaching all sources, no matter how similar, as an effort to get every single record in the historical record databases to have that little "attached to a Family Tree individual" icon:
Recently FamilySearch has been advising of specific sources that have been updated.
This effort to reduce duplicate sources by retiring duplicate record sets is quickly becoming controversial among users. I have not seen any sources that are actually being updated, just ones that are slated to be removed because they contain the same information. The problem is, often they do not contain the same information. Here is one example:
Note that record that is going to be retired contains the person's birth date while the record being retained does not. I suspect that the choice of which to retain in this case is based on which one was used to create the person in Family Tree.
People who do the indexing can and do mistranslate the information in the original record.
It's not just the indexers who have trouble! I frequently come across situations in researching my wife's Norwegian ancestors where in the original record the parish priest has spelled the father's or mother's name differently in every single birth record for their children. For example, the birth records for the five children in the family may have the mother's name spelled as Martha, Marta, Maritha, Maretha, and Maritte. The indexing will have the five different spellings because the indexers were being perfectly accurate in transcribing what is really in the record.
I have found it very easy to create a duplicate person page, even with careful checking; then discovering later that several person pages exist for that same person, usually associated with a birth/baptism for each of multiple children and the parent’s names are spelled slightly different, have a middle name, or a variety of patronymic naming patterns, etc.
Merging often reveals other duplicate person pages for people in the relationship and creates the need for more merges.
One situation in this co-operative project that is Family Tree that leads to "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth" by users is when other users incorrectly merge two people "because Possible Duplicates said they were duplicates." Due to early problems with the Possible Duplicates being too lax in its criteria of what might be a duplicate, the programmers have made it more and more strict in what the routine presents as a duplicate.
So yes, it is very easy to create a person initially that actually is a duplicate and have the other duplicates only show up as you add more and more information to the one you created. Sometimes the duplicate will not show up until you have added a spouse, child, or parent to the profile you created because then the Possible Duplicates routine has family relationships to use to increase the likelihood of a correct match. This aspect of creating new profiles is intentional to protect Family Tree as much as possible from incorrect merges of similar people who are not duplicates.
Correctly merging duplicates, as you are finding, is a major part of the work we users have to do to clean up and consolidate the decades of old research on our families that has all been tossed together in Family Tree. I ran across one family of my wife's relatives in which the couple had about a dozen or so children. I did not add any profiles to Family Tree for them. By the time I merged existing Family Tree profiles that had come from extraction records in the IGI and PRF of the the priest's copy of the parish register, the deacon's copy of the parish register for births of both parents and all the children and the marriage records for the parents and all the children and the submitted research of two or three past researchers which was in the IGI and Ancestral File so that there was only one Family Tree profile for each of them, I had done 120 merges.
I personally find it quite satisfying work to get these profiles all sorted out and properly combined.
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Today I check my father's person page and saw that his title name was tagged for all 11 sources, but when I reviewed the tagged sources list, I found only 5 of them truly reflected the title name. So, how does that happen?
When adding a source to a person through the Source Linker, the default is to tag everything possible:
I'm pretty sure a lot of people either don't bother to evaluate whether a particular source should be tagged to a particular piece of information or not or leave all the check marks as they are "because the computer said they should be tagged" and so never uncheck anything ever. Personally I feel this decreases the usefulness of the whole concept of tagging.
I began adding alternative names and tagging the source that reflected it. But, I wonder if FamilySearch couldn't work that into the processing of accepted hints -- to attribute the name to an alternative category from the get-go.
It would be very nice if we could tag Other Information while attaching a source that supports it. But it was only very recently that the programmers were able to develop tagging that information at all. So maybe they will be able to come up with a way to tag it while attaching a source some day. In a discussion shortly after tagging Other Information, one of the designers mentioned the difficulties involved. The main one is that a particular Other Information item does not exist until the Source Linker creates it after the Attach button is clicked and you can't tag something that does not exist yet.
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Answers
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I have been told that FamilySearch does not create the person page. Yet, I have found FamilySearch to be listed in the Changes section as providing the initial information. I can't find an example to illustrate this situation now, but I have come across it when dealiing with duplicate persons that require merging. The person page may only list the person created and a parent.
Thank you, PABulfinch for your speedy reply with concise instructions. I think you are saying that FamilySearch is the creator of a person page when it came from their other system back in 2012/13.
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Thank you Gordon for your speedy response and comprehensive comments to my query. I gave it an evaluation of "Awesome" which I think registered. Undoubtedly, there are articles that cover this, but you took the time to thoroughly explain many things in your answer, and you provided links. I appreciate that! Because I have memory issues, I printed it all out for future reference.
I didn't mean to give the impression that the indexers were the only people who could make mistakes. I know that every one of the person's sources has the potential to be incorrect. For example, correct census reports are dependent on the recorder, the person providing the information and the person who creates a summary record. That's why originals, if available, are so important -- many are not. But I often find that FamilySearch has the original. FamilySearch also enables corrections to be made in the summary report.
I, too, like to see profiles sorted out. And, I go off on tangents with profiles that I come across (while researching my relatives) because it is obvious they are needing attention.
I have been working more recently on source designations for the Vitals. Today I check my father's person page and saw that his title name was tagged for all 11 sources, but when I reviewed the tagged sources list, I found only 5 of them truly reflected the title name. So, how does that happen? I began adding alternative names and tagging the source that reflected it. But, I wonder if FamilySearch couldn't work that into the processing of accepted hints -- to attribute the name to an alternative category from the get-go. By the same token, births and deaths may not match the Vital one and the only way I see to handle this, is as a custom event. Often census birth years are off by a year (or more) and do not include the full birth date. (If the birth year in a census is correct, I leave it tagged for the Vitals as it at least confirms the year.)
It was a surprise to me, to learn that FamilySearch has a name for its tree -- Family Tree -- I have associated that name only with the magazine. It just never registered when I used the Family Tree drop down that it pertained to the big picture here.
Again, thank you! I will no longer feel guilty about not reviewing all the sources for duplicates.
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