Do not let patrons delete a relationship.
FS/FT does not allow an individual to be deleted so why can a relationship be deleted? All of my ancestors are from Norway and I have been researching and adding ancestors to my family tree since 1975, when I took my first family history class in Sunday School.
About two years ago, someone from Norway discovered my family tree and started changing all of my end-of-the line ancestors who were identified by me as Mrs. Ole or Mrs. Jon, etc. Her objection, when I first contacted her was that Norwegian women do not use Mrs. because they keep their maiden name. I told her that FS/FT does not want to have a wife known as NN or Unknown, but asks that the wife be listed as Mrs. along with the husband's name. That explanation did not satisfy her.
She has continued to change or delete the relationship to the wives in my family tree for at least two years. After I asked her not to change a Mrs. Jon to unknown, she started changing the word Unknown to Ukjent, which is the Norwegian name for Unknown. Now I have about a hundred Mrs. Jon or Mrs. Ole being sealed to Ukjent. When I wrote Nina to say that FS/FT did not want the wife's name to be changed to Ukjent, she started changing the Mrs. Jon or Ole to Fru. Now I have a ton of Frus in my family tree.
Today, I noticed that my AXEL did not have a wife. When I looked at the changes done to AXEL, I saw that AXEL's wife, MRS. AXEL had been deleted as the mother of ANNE AXELSDATTER. If I didn't remember that I had added this couple as parents of ANNE, I would have added another mother and the first MRS. AXEL GLHD-RYY, with her ordinances reserved, would have no family because she had deleted her as the mother and the SP would not be reserved nor the SS.
I have asked the missionaries who man the help line for help to contact her. I have heard back from FS telling me what she is doing is not abuse. One brother said he thought it fit in the category of malicious behavior. However, I got a message back from FS telling me it is not malicious. Could you please keep patrons from the ability to DELETE relationships? Also, she deletes my sources and alternative names and my relationships to family members. PLEASE HELP!
Answers
-
I'm not LDS, so my interest in this question is purely academic, but how do you do anything for or with a person for whom you do not know any part of her name?
I sympathize with the Norwegian user: she clearly wants her ancestors in the shared tree to be as fully-documented and accurate as possible. Unknown wives are neither documented nor accurate, so detaching them is fully justifiable. However, you've clearly put some work into these blank profiles, and thus justifiably object to their removal.
In trying to resolve this conflict, keep in mind that if the other user is not LDS, then she cannot see any trace of your work. All she sees is a blank, labeled in a language and manner that's completely foreign to the time and place.
(If you take a step back and think things through, you'll see that the shared tree would be completely non-functional if relationships could not be deleted. How would errors ever get fixed?)
4 -
You first contacted the FamilySearch Help Line, but you didn't receive the answer you wanted. You have now contacted the FS Community hoping for a different answer. The Community is composed of other contributors to the FSFT. Most participants here are not staff or even members of the LDS Church. We have no power to stop anyone from doing anything.
And, as Julia rightly pointed out, contributors to the tree need to be able to correct errors and improve documentation.
4 -
My wife is from Norway so we have done a lot of Norwegian research. Also, I've got Swedish ancestors so have done a lot of work there, also. I have also seen researchers tack on completely undocumented place holders for unknown fathers and mothers. While it is true that everyone has a mother, Mrs. Jon, Unknown, NN, Ukjent or anything else that means "I have no idea who this individual really is but I know she existed because she had a child" are all entirely equivalent.
So now we have to separate this topic into two different subjects.
1) What is the best practice to document a person who is known to have existed due to family relationships but for whom we will never have a name? There have been quite a few discussions one these boards and there does not seem to be any firm conclusion. I doubt FamilySearch really cares all that much. Personally I don't think it really matters but Unknown is probably more accurate and would vote on the side of your Norwegian relative. After all, "Mrs." is completely out of place for any Norwegian living as far back as those end-of-line ancestors.
2) What is required to complete temple work? Current guidelines are to use Mrs. [husband's name] as that place holder for an unknown mother or wife's name. However, after the sealing is completed, it no longer matters what is found in Family Tree. Changing the name there has no effect on the sealing. The official record of that is stored forever in a completely different database with the original names under which the sealing was done. Also, the sealing date on the ordinance page does not change or vanish just because a name is changed. As you can see on the ordinance page, a sealing of a child does not even vanish if one or both of the parents is removed. It still sits there with "ghost parents." Those original parents can generally be found in the Change Log.
Basically, as long as the sealing is completed, I wouldn't be too concerned with what is used for an end of line place holder other than to continue to hope to be able to find a real name some day.
(By the way, just to keep terminology correct, that Norwegian did not discover your family tree. She, as is right and proper, found her ancestors in FamilySearch's tree and is working to improve the records for her family, including her end-of-line ancestors. Even if we are the first users to contribute individuals to FamilySearch's tree that does not give us any priority or proprietary rights to those profiles over the hundreds of other descendants of those people who may want to contribute to this work of building FamilySearch's tree of the human family.)
I would suggest dropping the battle over those meaningless place holders and turn to a more productive discussion about what is going on with the sources. Do you know why she is deleting them? Do you have an example of one so we could try and figure out what her reasoning is? And those relationships with all the names? Could you post an example of one of those? There must be some reasoning behind that. It is possible that she is using new research that you do not have available which shows older sources to have been incorrect. For example, information in a bygdebok written in 1920 could well have been superseded by newer research by now.
5 -
I should mention that there are dueling help center article on this topic. One of them, https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-add-siblings-to-family-tree directly states, "If one of the parents of the child is unknown, click Add Child with an Unknown Mother or Father. You can include details in a note or Life Sketch" and never says anything about adding a place holder for the unknown parent. You can read this sentence to say the recommendation is not to add one.
Also, I should have mentioned that guidelines do change. You must have seen scattered through the Norwegian section of Family Tree the thousands of children sealed to "Ole" and ?. All those question marks are from sealings in which a child was sealed to "his/her father Ole" and "his/her mother" which was the current guideline when those were completed. Those are valid and do not need to be redone and most of them can have the ? replaced with the mother's actual name with sufficient research in the marriage, death, and census records.
2 -
Mod note - the original post was edited for the privacy of living persons. For more details, see the Code of Conduct. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/community-code-of-conduct
1
