Why and how does Family Search add sources to my relative?
I found an ancestor with conflicting information that I am trying to fix. However looking at the sources most of them are from Family Search. So I am confused. I know we receive hints from Family Search but why do they determine if a source is connected to my ancestor and then add that information to the relative?
See sources for Thomas Mason 2182-63G
Best Answers
-
What Àine states is correct except for the sources you are seeing which look like this:
This source is an IGI record from the old extraction program. It means that a profile was created, in this case in 1974, for the Charles Mason this source refers to and to it was added his father, Thomas Mason. After Family Tree was created in 2012, FamilySearch was able to take these old extraction record sources and attach them to the old IGI profiles. (If you are a church member, be aware that the IGI profile always has ordinances associated with it). This source is also the reason why Charles has a duplicate mother of ?. As you can see, Charles' mother is not listed in this source.
The important thing to remember is that this Thomas Mason may not be your Thomas Mason!
Someone may have merged this Thomas with another Thomas either in New Family Search or FamilyTree. You can determine this by going to the cleanest Change Log, which would be the one for Charles. Go to the very start to see who Charles' father originally was when he was imported into FamilyTree in 2012:
Here his father is the Thomas Mason 2182-63G he is listed under. You'll have to figure out, and fix, why someone in 2017 added another father, Henry Mason, and whether that was through a merge that needs to be reversed or by adding him directly to Henry so a relationship just needs to be removed.
The point here is that if there is one of these extraction records, then you should never just remove the source "because it is wrong." You should go into source and the change log, figure out the original profile that was created from the source, and if there is an error backing that original profile out of the current profile, almost always by reversing a incorrect merge. This maintains the relationship between the original profile and the extracted source.
(For church members only: if you just remove source, then you leave the ordinances for the person in the extracted record on the wrong person. Backing out the incorrectly merged in original profile to which the extracted record is linked keeps the correct ordinances on the correct person.)
5 -
Going back to your Thomas. There are 14 extraction record sources on his profile. This means that fourteen IGI records that were converted into Family Tree profiles for a Tomas Mason have been merged. At best, these were all merged correctly and they are all your Thomas Mason. At worse, these are fourteen different men by the name of Thomas Mason and you need to restore each one of them back to their original IGI Profile/Extraction Record pairs.
1
Answers
-
Older contributions attributed to "FamilySearch" just mean that they were created in and imported from an earlier version of the program. It was not possible to import the names of each contributor from the older version to the current version. Nature abhors a vacuum - the name of the contributor could not be left blank, and the decision was made to put "FamilySearch" in that spot.
If you have better information, feel free to edit anything that anyone has contributed to your ancestor, even if the name looks "official."
3 -
So you can get acquainted with these IGI profile/Extracted Record pairs, here are two examples that have never been touched by FamilyTree users.
This is a extracted christening record which was entered into the IGI in 2001. You can see the one to one correspondence between the information in the source and the information in the profile:
----- https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/MP1X-BJL
The only deviation is the addition of a patronymic surname. Long ago there was an automatic routine that added a surname to these records that did not have one. Often the routine made mistakes as it did here.
This is an extracted marriage record which was entered into the IGI in 1998. Again there is a one to one correspondence between source and profile. These really confuse people because they so often only contain the name of the bride and groom and the marriage date and place. Depending on the record source, they may sometime include a birth year for each of the couple or father's names. This one, however, is of the simplest type.
----- https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/9W69-SVR
For this type of marriage IGI/Extraction set you really have to go back to the original record and do a bit of research to figure out who they really are so the couple can be merged correctly with other profiles for them.
2
