Deleting Info without explanation should be REQUIRED.
I had an encounter a person WHO DELETED an entry that I MADE? connected to MY TREE which SHE deleted without explanation other than referring me to another website. She was just plain RUDE. are we not all suppose to learn here?? isn't that what this FAMILY SEARCH is about.?? I asked her to explain why she deleted my info entry and she basically said this is not your info it is a public and then she said
"If you are referring to a family tree they aren't considered sources. Google genealogical standards for sources. I'm not being rude, just accurate."
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It is important to keep in mind when working in Family Tree that we are not building "our" trees here. We are contributing information we have to FamilySearch's public tree. When we have added a piece of information to the tree, it is no longer ours and is fair game for anyone to correct or improve.
It is also important to keep in mind, on both sides of a conversation, that it is very easy to confuse conciseness and brevity for rudeness and take offense where none was intended.
I would encourage you to continue the conversation with that other user calmly and in the spirit of wanting to learn, which we all are here to do. If she added a reference as to why she was deleting the entry by referring to another website, then it sounds like she was making a good faith effort to explain the change.
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What do you mean by "entry"?
Was it a conclusion on a profile, such as a birthdate or a residence? If so, was there any documentation for the information, such as a birth register entry or a census record? You can greatly reduce the likelihood of people making changes if you attach and tag all of the evidence supporting a conclusion.
As the other user pointed out (perhaps a tad ackwardly), there is no such thing as "my tree" or "your tree" on a collaborative platform like FamilySearch's Family Tree. The goal is one and only one profile per deceased person, and anyone can edit nearly anything to work toward that goal.
If you believe your data was correct, the good news is that you can restore it, without needing to re-type anything. To do so, go to the profile's Details page, find the Latest Changes box in the right-hand column, and click Show All at the bottom of that box. This opens a list of every change made to the profile, in reverse chronological order. To restore a conclusion, scroll down to where it was originally entered, and click "Restore". (If the change log is long, you can use the filters to find the entry.)
In my experience, requiring a reason statement is seldom fruitful. People will just type something useless, such as "wrong", or even just a period. In fact, I'm guilty of this myself: when adding a profile via Source Linker, it sometimes requires a reason why you know this person is dead. 99% of the time, I encounter this requirement immediately after entering the person's death date and place, and/or his/her 19th century birthdate. I therefore generally fulfill the requirement with an exclamation mark (as a stand-in for the expletives that I actually want to apply).
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I remove unsourced entries too.
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@jonwithnoh said "I remove unsourced entries too"
Perhaps unfortunately, the logical justification for that sailed away in 2012(?) when FamilySearch loaded FamilyTree with information from the IGI (and whatever) without adding any sources. I daren't think how many profiles there are in FS FT with the Research Help "No Sources Attached" and it would not be a good idea to remove their names, dates, relationships, etc, just because they have no sources.
As for odd entries in the middle of otherwise sourced profiles, I always find it more useful to stick something in the "Reason This Information Is Correct" box to say "No known justification for this value". After all, while there's no proof that the written value is correct, neither is there any proof that it's wrong and it might be more fruitful to leave it there as a hint. Of course, if the value is (in my opinion) nonsensical (e.g. a child born to a mother when she's 60y old) then I reserve the right to delete it, because its function as a hint would make no sense.
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Perhaps unfortunately, the logical justification for that sailed away in 2012(?) when FamilySearch loaded FamilyTree with information from the IGI (and whatever) without adding any sources. I daren't think how many profiles there are in FS FT with the Research Help "No Sources Attached" and it would not be a good idea to remove their names, dates, relationships, etc, just because they have no sources.
Yeah, but the IGI is as prone to mistakes as much as any other secondary database that includes user contributions. There's no guarantee it was ever right. Those profiles have had a decade, and if neither the system nor any editor has been able to identify a single source that validates it, and nobody's been able to connect them with additional relationships, they're just pollution at this point. If the names are common (like most are) and the dates and locations are off, it's impossible to tell if it's a profile for Person A with some mistakes or Person B who just has some superficial similarities.
As for odd entries in the middle of otherwise sourced profiles, I always find it more useful to stick something in the "Reason This Information Is Correct" box to say "No known justification for this value". After all, while there's no proof that the written value is correct, neither is there any proof that it's wrong and it might be more fruitful to leave it there as a hint
If we all do this, who actually cleans it up? Nothing gets fixed by a dozen people attaching signs to it saying "this is broken".
What's worse is that very few people are even going to bother opening the "Reason it's correct" box, (And I don't know, but kind of doubt messages in that box gets picked up by third party software, copied over by syncing software or included in GEDCOMs.) Unless it's ridiculously absurd, people are going to accept whatever's there uncritically, copy it to GENI, Find a Grave and their Ancestry tree, where it'll get airborne and infesting a bunch of other Ancestry personal trees until, hey, now it's "sourced" because it's on all these different sites so how could it be wrong?
I'm thinking here especially about all the times a bunch of unsourced children get piled on to modestly-sourced 17th and 18th C. profiles, where we might have a name and alleged birth year, but no other information or no sources. How do we prove those are wrong -- how do we prove a negative? How do we know if two brothers had a few kids with with the same name, or somebody attached a few duplicate profiles to the wrong father?
I've made the mistake of tracing one of my lines Way Back, to 15th C. England and a bunch of nobility. There are TONS of duplicates there, with entire lines being re-imported weekly. The relationships are fairly well-sourced, but the dates are not, so the duplicates might be off a few decades and people are often attached to the wrong generation. I've also seen people mark all these obvious duplicates as Not a Match because two sets of unsourced dates and town names don't match completely. That's bad. We can't let the system get more and more clogged up because we're afraid of tossing away whatever unsourced piece of GEDcrud just got imported.
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Oh, forgot the big new pet peeve: unsourced middle names. Those are especially pervasive because so many people seem convinced everybody in history had them. It doesn't matter how many articles pointing out how rare they were in America and Britain before the late 18th C. I share, if it's on GENI or Find a Grave memorial, even if it's not on the grave marker itself, people insist on adding it.
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@RTorchia Yup, I've run into that problem too. How did that all get started, anyway? Like, someone had to see that person's name, and say: "Because I can't find a middle name for this person, I'm going to give them one!"
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Alright, to summarize, the FamilySearch tree belongs to everyone, not just you. If you changed information on someone, that information got changed for everyone on the website. This is what she was trying to tell you by saying that it is public.
And she is actually right that family trees are not valid sources. They are incredibly prone to spreading misinformation and combining people arbitrarily. If you find a tree that has information you don't, find the source the tree used and use that as your source, not the tree itself. If the tree doesn't have any sources, don't trust it, because it probably just came from another tree, which is how misinformation usually spreads among family trees.
A better option would be to search for a primary source (a source created at the time of the event) if you can, and use secondary sources if you have to. A secondary source is one created after the event, usually by people who knew the person the record is about, or someone who has the original record. Secondary sources are less reliable than primary sources, as they can fall victim to faulty memory, typos, and other errors. Still, they are generally considered far more reliable than a tree.
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Pretty much. A lot of people just assume middle names were always a thing and can't imagine anybody didn't have one. Most of the fictitious ones I see are:
- The mother's maiden name.
- Backported from one given to a namesake from a later generation.
- Two names crammed together when somebody can't figure out which one is correct, usually accompanied by sources for each that actually belong to two separate people.
- The middle initial "S." from that one census where it was used to mark 'Senior'.
- "Washington" added to anybody named George, "Jefferson" for any Thomas, "Franklin" for any Benjamin, etc., even when the person in question was born before any of those were household names.
- "Mary", "Ann" or "Elizabeth" haphazardly added to any woman's name because they all had that right? Also, "Henry" for men named John or Thomas.
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@RTorchia I don't know whether to be glad that #6 is the only one I've seen in my tree, or worried that I'm missing a lot more.
I may need to double check my Dad's side...
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