Changes made by volunteer project
I am looking at a record (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/vitals/9F8S-PBB) where the dob was modified by the volunteer project. As there are no sources showing where the dob stems from I was hoping to ask the person who modified the record. Could you please let me know how to do so.
Answers
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The date of birth was not modified by the user Volunteer Project. All that was changed by that user was that the place of birth was standardized. Volunteer Project is a special user associated with the Improve Place-Names feature of FamilySearch.
The date and original place of birth for this person was set in 2012 by a user identified only as FamilySearch. That means this data came from the original data that started Family Tree, and it originated in some other system. Unfortunately there is no way to connect that data to where it came from.
Your best course of action is to use the information on the profile and try to find matching records.
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Thank you for the explanation, which is much appreciated.
Is it possible that the data / records from the other system have limited / restricted access as I cannot find a record for Alexander Kennedy (9F8S-PBB) with a matching year of birth? (The marriage record for Alexander only shows his age as "Full" so cannot be used to calculate the approximate year of birth of 1834 given.)
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My understanding is that anything and everything from that original set of data will have been loaded into FamilySearch FamilyTree. There won't have been anything to give a date of birth for that Alexander. Instead, his DoB will have been estimated from the date of marriage by some such idea as 25 years old at date of marriage (or 21 or....)
All very crude and probably quite pointless - the guy could have been any age when he married.
Really, the only reason those records exist is to record the marriage - anything else is an estimate/guess/informed guess/logical deduction, etc.
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So, @Adrian Bruce1, we should not assume that primary sources exist for any of this 'FamilySearch 2012' data - in other words, what we see should be treated with a big pinch of salt unless relevant source(s) are separately identifiable for an individual profile through Record Search or other methods? I find the presence of estimates particularly alarming, especially as this is not made clear (I'd personally read 'about' as 'maybe a year or so out', not as complete guesswork).
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This appears to be a commonly accepted practice - though one I have long argued against. The most common example(s) I encounter is an age of birth being inputted as 25 years before the event for a male and 21 years prior to the marriage for the female.
As Adrian comments, either party could be of any age (between, say, 15 and 70+ at the time of marriage), so implying a specific age (when completely unknown) is just not sound reasoning / genealogy.
An area when data is commonly misinterpreted lies in marriage records that show an individual as "over 21". This is generally indexed as "21" (in FamilySearch and other indexing projects), which again is generally totally misleading with regards to the facts.
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@MandyShaw1 proposed:
we should not assume that primary sources exist for any of this 'FamilySearch 2012' data - in other words, what we see should be treated with a big pinch of salt unless relevant source(s) are separately identifiable for an individual profile through Record Search or other methods?
Well, there aren't any primary sources visible for this one. And yes, we should absolutely take it with the entire contents of the Great Salt Lake unless we can find the original sources.
The interesting thing about this one is that it is possible to take it a bit further back.
Menu option Search / Genealogies gives access to a lot of the original data that fed FS Family Tree. I used that menu option to search for "Fanny Carteer" (maybe it's a spelling mistake but it makes her easier to track than her husband). There is one person with that name (and spelling) whose record is in the original International Genealogical Index (IGI) collection. The record is on https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:9F8S-P1S
There is a citation but it doesn't say a lot:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "International Genealogical Index (IGI)," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:9F8S-P1S : accessed 2024-04-17), entry for Fanny Carteer; submitted by jgmeyer1936916 [identity withheld for privacy]; no source information is available.
I would take a wild guess that this was one of the extraction programmes that indexed records - in this case, marriages from Port Elizabeth, maybe. And some further searching shows that the original for this marriage is on https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:811G-C9PZ but, as suggested above, the ages just say "Full Age".
As for "Estimate" or "about" - my experience is that people use the terms pretty interchangeably - the only safe thing is to treat both as "Maybe sensible, maybe a wild guess!"
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Hopefully the Profile Quality Score initiative will help here in that such completely unsourced 'data' will be easier to spot.
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A lot of the "FamilySearch 2012" data is from input done during the beta phase. I know that I did include sourcing, or tried to, although there were frequent glitches and inability to finish the process due to it hanging. The method of creating sources was also very restrictive; it's come a long way since then.
Imo, those "FamilySearch 2012" entries are no different from any other entry that does not yet have the source attached.
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Thank you everyone for your responses which have been very insightful.
I was hoping the year of birth for Alexander had come from a death record, for example. The year is coincidentally very close to what I was expecting given what the family has been able to tell me about that branch of the family tree.
Coincentally the year of birth for Fanny Carter also matched closely to what it would have been, based on the year and age shown on the death record I had found for her.
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