Infogram observations
This is an entertaining idea. However, it obscures the origins of pre-revolutionary war arrivals by saying that most of my ancestors migrated from British North America. No, they were in, say, what is now North Carolina or Pennsylvania, having migrated from outside North America, and stayed there until well after the Revolution. It would be more interesting to show migration from, say, 16-17th century England or France. Are there any plans to reflect this information?
Also, seeing that the most common names in my family tree are John and Mary isn't much of a revelation.I'd like to know more about the Isaacs and Permelias.
Answers
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I (like other users of this Community) can figure out from context that you probably recently got some sort of campaign email from FamilySearch, but I have no other clue as to the antecedent of the "This" in your first sentence, nor do I know what you mean by the word "Infogram" in your title.
In general, I find FS's auto-generated messages to be aggravating at best, so I have unsubscribed from all of them. If I want to know about the Johns, Marys, Isaacs, and Permelias in my family, I can use the report functions of the offline tree software that I use as my backup for the publicly-editable online tree on FS.
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Most likely the reference is to the Infographic campaign. Like most campaigns, it's intended to be a teaser to catch the interest of some people. It's unlikely to satisfy those looking for a detailed, scientific analysis of their relatives in Family Tree.
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Thanks for your replies. I initially left feedback on the infogram /infographic page, not really asking a question. Then someone from FamilySearch sent me an email telling me to copy and paste my comments into this forum, which I hadn’t really used before. So I appreciate the responses, but I’m getting the impression that this is not the place to reach FS management. I do think any categorization of my ancestors as having “migrated” from British North America is unhelpful when they didn’t actually move.
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This "one" has been around for a few months, but time has not improved it. I laughed at it when I first received it. I saw someone commenting favorably about it on social media earlier this week, so I took another look. No change.
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Thanks to Alan's link, I took a look. Like Áine, I laughed.
The funniest part for me is that it says "Hungary" and "United States" for both the most common and least common birthplaces. This is perhaps because those are the only birthplaces for me or my ancestors, but it's, shall we say, a rather bizarre presentation of that fact.
I'm half-tempted to ask my cousin in Hungary to see what it says for him under "most of my ancestors emigrated from", given that none of his ancestors emigrated at all. (I at least have my parents as actual bona-fide immigrants: 1% of my family tree.)
But what really caught my attention is what the existence of this campaign says about the perpetually-recurring request on FS's feedback forums: "why can't I search just my tree?" The oft-repeated answer is that it's a problem of defining the scope, but clearly, FS came up with some method of doing so that didn't overload their processing bandwidth, in order to generate these statistics for each user. Is there any chance of "bottling" that method and offering it to users, so that they can search in (or at least compile statistics from) "just their trees"?
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I'm not sure what "just my tree" consists of in this infographic. "Total names in my family tree" is 197 on my version of the graphic. My contributions show a very different number. And the graphic completely ignores my Irish paternal side.
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Hmmm
"Least common birth places: Ireland …"
"Most of my ancestors emigrated from Ireland"
So, even though it's the least common birthplace, nonetheless, most of my ancestors emigrated from there. 🤔
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@Adrian Bruce1, yeah, I was noticing that: it's phrased as if everyone's ancestors were all emigrants. What it actually meant to say (I think) is that "of my emigrant ancestors, the greatest number did so from __". But that's apparently too complicated language for an infographic.
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