IGI entry with no batch number: how do I find out when it was created, or contact the submitter?
This IGI entry (citation & URL below) is very interesting to me because, apart from unsourced family records, I have found zero other reference anywhere to the parents of Mercy Adeline Greene (my 3 greats grandmother, GVX9-NCR). (I am also missing 2 of the siblings Mercy apparently had.) This entry doesn't give me a primary source, obviously, but it's a bit better than nothing.
Citation/URL: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "International Genealogical Index (IGI)," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/2:1:MSZ8-HPQ : accessed 2025-03-07), entry for Mercy Adeline Green; submitted by [redacted by me here] [identity withheld for privacy]; no source information is available.
I have two problems: my inability to contact the submitter (they are not listed in FS Chat), together with the lack of a proper document creation date anywhere (which surely is not good practice?)
What I want to avoid, obviously, is citing an entry that has somehow got added to the IGI based either on our unsourced family records or (though this is clearly very unlikely) on the information I have myself added to FSFT about Mercy Adeline. At the moment I have no way of confirming that this evidence is genuinely distinct from what I already had.
Any ideas, anyone?
Thanks.
Best Answer
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Have you looked at other websites that host trees? Often a contributor will use the same or a similar username on multiple sites.
There are at least 19 trees for Mercy Adeline on Ancestry. But, most of them have her marrying Willis Darling before she was 10 years of age. And, none of them show the same parents for her that show at the URL you posted.The first tree I looked at, because it had the most sources, has 7 siblings for Mercy Adeline.
New England has more available records for that early date than most of the rest of the USA. If you haven 't checked the NEHGS website for records, I would recommend that you do.
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Thanks @Áine Ní Donnghaile. Yes, Willis and she have some strange references (not helped by Willis' second wife having been an effectively unrelated Mary Ann Green[e], whom people tend to think of as a sibling of Mercy's ... I would guess a lot of the Ancestry wives are actually Mary Ann, who married Willis 20 years after Mercy did).
Sadly I checked NEHGS early in my investigations with no success.
I do like your idea of looking for the submitter elsewhere, will get onto that!
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NEHGS also offers free consultations, in case you haven't tried that. Most of their senior staff members are in SLC this week; I would wait a week or so before trying that.
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I only tried once to contact an individual who had submitted an IGI entry - that was back in the 1980s! I wrote a letter to an address in the U.S. (no computers / email back then) and never got a reply*. I figured that even at that date the item might have been submitted considerably earlier, so here in the 2020s it would seem rather unlikely you would be able to make contact with the submitter - even assuming they are not deceased. The suggestions provided by Áine would seem to be your best way forward.
( * A missionary at the then Hyde Park Family History Library gave me a print-out that contained the submitter's full details - I doubt if those papers still exist, and even if they do I think data protection issues would mean it unlikely we could get hold of that kind of personal detail today.)
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@MandyShaw1 I was not able to find this submission in the Family Group Records collections online (most are restricted), but it would likely have been submitted before 1974. Mercy is not found in the IGI collection containing names extracted from records and that's why there's no Batch #. The submissions that are the sources of the Genealogies collection were similar to this example. The submitter was asked to report where the information was obtained:
Access to these records is not freely available because they contain personal and sensitive information. I have cut off a column on the right side showing church data. Sorry, I can't be of more help. As Paul said, trying to find the original researcher from probably many decades ago would be fruitless, but it would be nice to know what was written in the upper right hand corner.
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Thank you very much @Paul W @Áine Ní Donnghaile @SerraNola
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