Bug in GEDCOM import?
A feature of FamilyTree is that data that I enter can be changed by others. Such a change should be an improvement. Now I suddenly found that some records of my relatives were merged with records with names such as GEDCOM DATA or NO SOURCES and all vital information of that records disappeared. That is not what I consider to be an improvement. I think this was not done by hand, someone seems to have used a GEDCOM file to enter records. You can see other examples when you look in FamilyTree for persons with first name GEDCOM of NO and family name DATA or SOURCES. This feels like a bug. Should this be reported?
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This is not a bug it. Is misunderstanding and misconduct.
Unfortunately, there are some users who do not understand the cooperative nature of Family Tree and try to make it a personal tree by deleting other users contributions rather than properly comparing, reconciling, and merging duplicates. Since we cannot delete profiles from Family Tree that other people have created, the only way these other users can get rid of a profile is to merge it into a trash can profile.
Apparently you have run across a user who feels that any profile from a GEDCOM file or any profile without sources should just be discarded out of hand with no evaluation.
Since profiles imported through a GEDCOM do not bring any sources with them, something which the importing user should go back and fix, and since GEDCOMs often introduce a lot of duplicates, something else which the importer should fix, some users have very strong feeling against them. It sounds like this user is being very extreme in this regards.
This type of wholesale "cleaning up of my tree" can be very damaging and should probably be reported as abuse.
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I see. I still cannot imagine that someone would change a name into 'NO SOURCES' or 'GEDCOM DATA' and therefore I suspected at some point a computer bug, but you say it happens. Thank you very much for this information!
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Hi - I don't think this is a bug. If you look at the latest changes, you will see when the name was changed and by what user. It sure causes some confusion.
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I cannot imagine that someone changes by hand the name 'Tonis ****' into the name 'GEDCOM DATA'. I think that the GEDCOM DATA file use by the changer is responsible for that. As said in my message, you can find in FamilyTree some people with the names GEDCOM DATA or NO SOURCES. These names, definitely not of people who have ever lived, were created by the same person who changed my data, though on different dates, so I surmise he used a corrupt, or at least incorrect GEDCOM file.
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I find it really hard to understand why many users change the name to a completely different person (called hijacking) or to something like GEDCOM DATA. In many of these cases, they are trying to match the name with the relationships. Usually, it is best to match the relationships to the name. It causes a great deal of confusion. Regardless of the change, if there is confusion around the name I have found these steps a good approach.
1 Go to the person page, details tab
2 Click the pencil icon adjacent to the name in the Vitals section
3 At the lower left, click on see all changes. This will present the total history of the name. Note, this same thing can be done on any of the pencil icons.
4 Restore the proper name for the person. It is really useful to look at the initial name of the person. This will be at the bottom of the list. Some refer to this as the intended identity.
5 Once you have the correct name, deal with any items needed such as merging, edit relationships etc.
hope this helps.
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I see the user who is insisting on changing the original profile names to "GEDCOM DATA" has created an ID ref. GTB4-N17 to explain his actions to "FamilySearch Administration & Support Teams" and any other user who stumbles across this "temporary person".
Sadly, by highlighting his point, he has done more harm than good. See FIND page at https://www.familysearch.org/search/tree/results?count=20&q.givenName=gedcom&q.surname=data, where you will also discover a number of IDs with the name "No Data" (carried over to Family Tree in 2012) and another (on page 2) with the name: "Duplicate someone redid all my already input data"!
I admit I did once take matters into my own hands (there being no admin response to "abuse" flags) and renamed individuals who had been given horrifying names by a user who definitely appeared to have "issues". She messaged me without any hint of contrition, but to chastise me for the damage I had performed to the profiles of her relatives!
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Yes, there can be a valid reason for hiding away clearly invalid profiles such as the instance reported years ago when a user found in Family Tree a very nice pedigree for a family of race horses. In that case FamilySearch did remove all those profiles. But this should be a very limited action for the most extreme cases and certainly not used as seen in that GTB4-N17. That type of wholesale "housecleaning because I don't want to do actual research to deal with these profiles with limited information or duplicates and correct them properly" can cause a lot of problems.
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With respect to:
GEDCOM DATA — please read Alert Note
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/collaborate/GTB4-N17
In response to comments posted above, further feedback on improving this approach or achieving the desired outcome by a different approaches is appreciated.
Please note that the Alert Note has been updated for greater clarity and will continue to be updated as needed and appropriately. The current content of the Alert Note follows.
=== Notes for FamilySearch Administration & Support Teams ===
- "GEDCOM DATA" is a temporary person created to the "host" Alert Note further below.
- "GEDCOM DATA" is a temporary person to be deleted after review by FamilySearch.
- One user persistently creates hundreds (thousands?) of persons, based only on "GEDCOM DATA."
- Multiple users have attempted to communicate with the same user while correcting the Family Tree.
- Multiple users have repeatedly merged hundreds (thousands?) of duplicative entries with pre-existing persons, where it is possible to do so.
- The "children" of "GEDCOM DATA" attached here are persons for whom no original records or credible sources can be found to support the claim that these person ever existed.
- The purpose of using "GEDCOM DATA" as a temporary person is to provide quantitative data for objective analysis by FamilySearch Administration & Support Teams and enable an appropriate response.
- Please refer to Change Log for each "child" of "GEDCOM DATA" for more information.
- Please refer to "My Changes" under "My Contributions" for the same user.
- Notes above were created about 3 August 2024, after multiple users began to observe a consistent and persistent pattern of behavior for the same user, across numerous branches of the Family Tree.*
- Notes above were updated on 3 October 2024, with additional content for greater clarity.
“GEDCOM Data” (or similar) is not a valid source for claiming identities, relationships or events.
“GEDCOM (an acronym for Genealogical Data Communications) was created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Church) in 1984 as a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different software applications.”
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/GEDCOM
To upload a GEDCOM file, click on [UPLOAD YOUR INDIVIDUAL TREE] at the bottom of:https://www.familysearch.org/search/genealogies
Identities, relationships or events claimed require citations to original records or credible sources derived from original records. Regardless of format, source citations should be specific enough to enable anyone else to find the same information, in order to review it for validity, accuracy, etc. For more information:https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Sources_and_Baby_Steps
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Identify_a_Category_of_Sources
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@Perry Streeter what does 'The purpose of using "GEDCOM DATA" as a temporary person is to provide quantitative data for objective analysis by FamilySearch Administration & Support Teams and enable an appropriate response' mean in practice? Also, I imagine you really don't want ordinary users going anywhere near it, but that's not clear from the text you have provided-why not start with FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY or similar?
Edit after seeing @Wayland K Adams' comment below - I wrote the above on the assumption that Perry works for FamilySearch. (It would be really helpful if Community marked FS employees in some way.)
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@Perry Streeter Just to be really clear, Perry are you part of Family Search. The reason for asking is your statement about this being done for FamilySearch Administration and Support Teams. This type of thing would normally fall outside the preview of FamilySearch. Have you coordinated this approach with any one in FamilySearch?
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Unfortunately, many things in that alert note appear to based on some major misconceptions and misunderstandings about how Family Tree works.
First off, as far as I'm aware from my own and other's experiences as discussed on these boards, there does not seem to be any FamilySearch administrators or support personnel that review this type of jumbled up mess of unrelated profiles. That job is left up to us users.
They do apparently occasionally investigate the practices of users reported repeatedly for abuse, but I'm not sure that importing a large number of records ever falls into that category.
Secondly, GEDCOM data has never been used as a source or basis for any of the profiles linked together. You need to properly understand what that phrase in the Reason Statement, which is a place to explain why something was done, really means. Reason Statements were never intended to hold sources. Sources go under Sources. When you see "GEDCOM Data" in the reason statement, this is FamilySearch shorthand for:
- This information was imported by user [user-name] via a GEDCOM file from that users external personal online or desktop genealogy file. While the original GEDCOM file may or may not have had many sources, media files, notes or other resources in it, the process which imports the GEDCOM file to FamilySearch strips out all of that additional data. Questions regarding the accuracy of the information and what source may have been originally attached should be directed to the user who performed the import.
I will agree that for a user to import a bunch of profiles then never go back and attach their sources is pretty shabby work, but it does not necessarily mean there are no sources and that those profile should be dismissed out of hand.
But I will also maintain that creating even temporary family relationships or otherwise corrupting an imported profile falls in the category of "six wrongs don't make a right."
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Oh dear, there was me thinking we'd finally found a FS employee with some sort of remit to analyse the impact of bulk data imports.
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I have several cousins who have imported a GEDCOM of their work on another site multiple times. Rather than repair the mess made by the first upload, they upload another copy full of the same or new errors.
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Here is why I am not in favor of artificially grouping unrelated profiles. I went back and tool another look at what has been done to the source-less profiles by looking closer at the last "child" of GTB4-N17, Neeltjen Tomas GTT5-LHN, and took a look at her change log and found the following example of why "cleaning up" the database can make a situation much worse.
Starting at the earliest entry of her change log, I found that she had a son attached at one point. That is who I'll analyze here.
User-1 who created the record G5J4-3LC imported just the following data:
- Name: Tomas Isaaks
- Birth: 1500, Huizinge, Groningen, Netherlands
- Death: 1568, Loppersum, Loppersum Municipality, Groningen, Netherlands
Not very complete information but enough that if someone was working on him in another profile, this copy would probably pop up as a duplicate. This is also enough information that if someone was familiar with records from the 1500s from this area of the Netherlands, it would probably be pretty easy to find the source this came from. In any event, it's not breaking any rules. There is nothing particularly annoying about it. And if it sat untouched in Family Tree for the next hundred years, it would not be hurting anything.
Then came User-2 who was apparently confident that he knew who Tomas was because he gave Tomas a wife and child. The wife has just name, birth date and place and death date and place but the child, whose profile was imported from New Family Search and was first submitted to FamillySearch in 1937 has some additional information, some of it wrong, and the original submission: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-997M-P212?wc=WWNV-N5F%3A352087301%2C353133201&cc=2060211&i=495 does have a source for her.
Again while it would have been nice for User-2 to explain his reasoning and provide any sources that may be in his private files. At this point this was still a pretty straight forward profile ready for further research.
Now we come to a major problem that I would view as misuse of the Family Tree database.
User-3 then made the following changes:
- Detached Tomas' wife.
- Detached Tomas' daughter
- Changed Tomas' name to GEDCOM DATA
- Deleted all birth information
- Deleted all death information
- Merged Tomas into Ronald Lloyd Bryant, Jr. b 1972, d 1972.
This turned a perfectly fine profile that could be improved into one with a mess of a change log that no one will be able to find and that will be really confusing to anyone who takes a look at Ronald's change log. All this with no valid justification. Just because the profile did not yet have sources. Millions of profiles in Family Tree don't have sources yet because the older FamilySearch systems they came from did not support sourcing. That is no reason to delete them all.
If User-1 seems to dumping a genealogy file he has created of thousands of name/birth/death info records, continuing to try to get someone at FamilySearch to explain to User-1 that this is being a bit problematic is a better course than mangling profiles in an attempt to hide them.
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Gordon Agree 100% with your comments. You mention about going to the earliest changes in the change log. I do this frequently. I heard a team applied here called intended identity. In other words, the name that was first given for the person. This is extremely helpful in the situation we are discussing here where the names have been changed to GEDCCOM Data etc. But it is also very helpful when records have been hijacked and made to look like another person. I find that going back to the intended identity really helps. Thanks for your excellent comments.
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Thank you to everyone for your contributions to this discussion. FamilySearch is very aware of the issue described in this post and is taking the appropriate action.
These changes represent a misuse of the platform and are in violation of both the FamilySearch Content Submission Agreement (https://www.familysearch.org/legal/familysearch-content-submission-agreement) and the FamilySearch Terms of Use https://www.familysearch.org/legal/terms), wherein it states:
5. Accuracy of Contributed Data. “You agree to provide true, accurate, and complete information to us. If any information you provide is, in our sole and absolute discretion, false or misleading, we shall have the right, but not the obligation, to take any remedial or preventative action we deem appropriate in our sole discretion, including restricting access to, deleting, and/or editing any of your Contributed Content” (FamilySearch Content Submission Agreement).
Additionally, the FamilySearch Code of Conduct states:
“... You further agree to do nothing that might disrupt the flow of data to and from this site, impact the service or performance of this site, or circumvent any of the controls or usage rules that we have implemented” (FamilySearch Terms of Use).
If you encounter a profile that seems problematic, the most effective action is to use the "Report Abuse" button. This is what FamilySearch encourages all users to do to help maintain the accuracy and integrity of the platform. Thank you for your understanding and willingness to follow our policies and procedures.
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