Am I looking at the world tree?
I am using geni.com to build a family tree at the moment, as I like how I can connect to the world tree and then instantly find how I am related to any given person, past or present. I was therefore using FamilySearch to look through records and find people - I was amazed at how I never hit a paywall. Anyway, I was looking at the record of one particular ancestor of mine, and saw a button that said 'Tree'. I pressed this, imagining it was either something some distant relative had put together, or something the site does automatically when it connects records. When I got to the tree, I saw the ancestor in question, their siblings and parents. I clicked arrows and saw there were more direct ancestors. Long story short, I'm still going back and back, finding direct ancestors from 100s of years BC. My question, therefore, is twofold:
First, is this the world tree that I have found?
Second, how well should I trust the connections that have been made: a) for the last few hundred years, b) for the thousands of years before that?
Answers
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Hi, yes this is a collaborative world tree (free of charge to use).
Re trusting the connections, it depends.
There are two aspects: the individuals (profiles) and the Couple and Parent/Child relationships that connect them.
The key is to look at the sources that have been applied. If you know of better sources, or if you find incorrect data and you have sources for a more correct version, you can edit the tree yourself to improve it.
You will find a lot of totally unsourced information, which you should never assume to be accurate, and also you will find sources that have been applied to the wrong profile or that are, honestly, rubbish, but you will find pockets of really accurate data. It all depends on who entered the information.
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You will also find many individual trees on the FamilySearch site in the Genealogies section. Those also can be of varying quality and reliability.
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The Family Tree on FamilySearch is like the Geni tree, minus all of the paywalls and the stuff that you can only fix if you've paid. (Or, to put it differently, Geni is what happens to the collaborative tree concept when a company decides to make money off of it. FamilySearch's Tree and WikiTree are two versions of the concept without that particular flaw.)
Like the Geni tree, the data on the FS tree is only as good as the research of the people who put it there. Once you get back before about 1700, it is my strong opinion that it is about 90% utter rubbish. (Another century and that number goes up to 99%.) Like all of the other collaborative trees out there, there is no authority vetting the data: it is all contributed by users just like you and me. (Even contributions credited to a user named "FamilySearch" are mostly actually public contributions, but they're from FS's prior systems, and the transfer [in 2012] did not allow preservation of contributor details.)
Where FamilySearch differs from all of the other collaborative tree sites is that it is also a (ginormous) repository of genealogical records. Geni sort of pretends toward this, with its (perpetually-paywalled) connections to MyHeritage, but the difference there is that MH is at best a data aggregator, not a repository. (Long rant goes here on MH's fraudulent practices, offering for money the things that are on FS and other sites for free.)
The advantage of having the records on the same site as the tree is that it makes it easy to cite one's sources; the disadvantage is that it's a perpetual source of confusion. There are people who encounter a fictional bit of the Tree on FS and thereafter discount everything from FS as rubbish, even when it's an image of their ancestor's birth registry entry or similar historical record. FS doesn't exactly make it easy to keep the concepts straight, with its identical-looking search interfaces for indexed records versus tree profiles, but I do appreciate the ease of adding sources here, compared to every other genealogy site I've tried.
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