Floating family groups

andreamarieinman1

Every once in a while I'll come across families that seem to just be on their own unconnected to anyone. Usually it's part of a census project. I found a family that appears to be a floating family that has existed since 2012 and has all of the possible temple work done for each individual. There are no sources attached (but it is definitely the family I'm researching in the 1850 US Census). What is going on here? How is this family's work done but seeming unattached to anyone else?

Julia Szent-Györgyi

In 2012 when the current Family Tree started, it was "seeded" with the data from FamilySearch's previous systems. Most of those previous systems were based (usually verbatim) on indexed events, with no provision for unifying families across multiple events. If a couple appeared as the parents in nine indexed baptisms, then they appeared in the system nine times apiece, each instance attached to just one of those nine children. Many (possibly most) of those legacy-data profiles have not been touched in the twelve years since they were imported.

Gordon Collett

Just to expand a little bit. Even if large family groups were submitted back prior to the opening of New FamilySearch which was really the first system that contained extended family relationships, they were always broken down into single line IGI entries that were either birth records showing a child and his or her parents or a marriage record that showed the couple. There are probably hundreds of thousands of these IGI records that were created prior to about 2007 that were imported into Family Tree.

The IGI records that came from extraction projects (See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVHb2XTKHoY for a full explanation) will have an indexed source attached to them. However, IGI records that came from patron submissions were never connected to the sources those users had even if the submission did include sources.