A bunch of generated empty profiles, all with name 'u'
Howdy,
An ancestral couple of mine have had a bunch of apparently computer generated empty profiles added, all with the name of 'u', and no data at all, just 2 parents just like them. Each case I'm aware of has 5 generations of these, so about 62 added empty profiles. This first one is Mary, https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/K2TD-TGR, and the second is her husband Robert McConnell, https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/details/K2TD-TNN. I can easily remove the parents of each of them, but that would leave a lot of orphaned profiles, all named u, so I've left them for others to examine. It looks like someone is needed that has an automated way to delete them.
Rob Jacobson
Answers
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@RobJacobson Only the creator can delete a profile, and only then if no-one else has edited it in the meantime. I suggest you click on the user name and send them a chat message requesting they either correct or delete these profiles, or at least explain their thinking. (If they had time to create 62 profiles one at a time, I imagine they have time to delete them!)
I doubt they are computer generated, the user name sounds like a human, and in theory 3rd party bulk inserts are not allowed, but the profiles may perhaps have come from a 3rd party program as shown on the Solutions Gallery - it would still be one profile at a time, if that was the case. They can't be from a FS gedcom import, as that would show a reason statement which is absent.
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@RobJacobson Thank you for reporting this issue. We will send it in to be looked into.
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@RobJacobson This looks so weird that I have to think this is the start of some planned project:
I checked a half dozen or so of these and they were all added by the same user on Sept 10, 2025, just nine days ago. All of them have "u" for the first name and no other information. With so little information on the profile, one could probably do this in about an hour by adding them manually one at a time. It's as if the user wanted to enter a blank pedigree chart and intends to start filling it in later.
I would not touch any of these because if anyone does then not even the user that entered them can delete them.
You might want to message the user by clicking on the user name and starting a chat to ask what this is for.
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@RobJacobson Thanks for bringing this to our attention!! This has been reported and is definitely a big problem.
Sam 😊
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@Sam Sulser Are you saying this could have been reported as abuse?
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Yes, it could have been.
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All: I really appreciate your comments and efforts. A few have suggested I contact the user - that's normally a good suggestion, but I'm unfortunately some kind of high functioning autistic that finds it hard to cold contact others, and that's easily overwhelmed, especially when there's unpleasantness involved, and this discovery invoked a negative reaction. (I know that sounds like a cop-out.)
I also couldn't help thinking I've only seen this one instance - perhaps this is occurring in many other places too…
@MandyShaw1 Thank you for the helpful comments, several things I did not know.
@Gordon Collett A blank pedigree chart is an interesting idea - in this case, I don't think it was what they were doing. I consider myself a decent researcher, and both Robert and Mary have no obvious parents or ancestry (trees elsewhere have impossible persons or a complete lack of evidence). There are McConnell's in Pennsylvania, but so far no clear match with any of them, no concurrent location with them (he appears to have moved around). From DNA evidence (a number of ThruLine matches, not necessarily reliable), our family believes we may have found a family (Michael King) for Mary, but hard to prove, that many generations back, and she's never mentioned with them (born in a gap between marriage and first child, no census records in her childhood).
Plus, why would someone create so many empty profiles in advance when it's very likely that many of those profiles already exist in FamilySearch.
@Ashlee C. and @Sam Sulser I'm glad you are on it - if you need me, I'll cooperate with anything you want me to do.
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@Sam Sulser thanks, what makes this ok for an abuse report where, for example, an egregiously careless gedcom import or unsourced-on-one-side edit warring apparently are not? I am not trying to be awkward, but we really could do with some rules on where the abuse bar sits.
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Just for the avoidance of any suggestion that this might be a user playing around at random, the user who created the profiles is a descendant of Mary and Robert.
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Preamble
I edited my previous two-line post, maybe half an hour later, to do two things:
- add some information information on a second example of the behaviour by the same user;
- add a screenshot of the Fan Chart.
That edited post appeared to have been successfully saved.
Now when I return to the discussion, maybe an hour later, I see that the edits that I made have been lost. The post has its original timestamp. I have had this happen before, but the edited post eventually surfaced about a day later. That was months ago, but maybe my edits will resurface at a time of vanilla's choosing.
Because of this behaviour by the vanilla platform, I am adding the following information as a separate post. I am not going to attempt to recreate my earlier edits because they have been superseded.
So, to get to the point
I have just carried out an experiment starting with the user's grandfather. In his landscape pedigree view, I used the EXPAND button to browse his ancestors as far as possible before the process became impossibly slow. I found that there are many profiles in his ancestry which have real names but whose parents are named either "u" or "unknown". I made no attempt to expand the "u" profiles to find out how far the user had gone. My finding is that there are at least 80 lowest-level "u" or "unknown" profiles among the grandfather's ancestors.
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I've done some more research.
All of the profiles we've looked at up to now have 'u' as given name and no surname.
I searched FT for such names, which gave 29678 results. This was too many to analyse, so I filtered it down to just those with a similar father name also (1423). Search string was q.surname=*&q.fatherGivenName=u&q.fatherGivenName.exact=on&q.fatherGivenName.require=on&q.givenName=u&q.givenName.exact=on&q.givenName.require=on
I analysed these profiles, first filtering out the false positives that Search had produced: 1317 remained. All but two of these had been created by our identified user, this month:
creationDate
minTime
maxTime
numCreated
03/09/2025
01:24:50
15:52:53
304
04/09/2025
01:14:25
13:57:10
269
05/09/2025
14:10:48
14:14:17
21
10/09/2025
23:48:06
23:54:29
30
11/09/2025
00:08:36
18:06:44
483
12/09/2025
15:18:24
18:22:47
208
I am finding it difficult to believe that anyone could do all that manually so quickly (and these are only the ones with a 'u' father!), but maybe those with better FS skills than mine would disagree.
Incidentally it is infuriating not to be able to search for a blank surname - why can't we do this?
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@MandyShaw1 I think that it would not be difficult for a user to create those profiles manually if they were using the fan chart pedigree view. For the two examples covering the shortest time range, we are looking at a rate of about 5 profiles per minute. I think that is entirely achievable. To create a profile from that view, the user could:
- Hover the mouse over an empty cell and click the displayed "+";
- In the resulting right-hand panel, type "u" in the First Names box;
- Click the appropriate sex option;
- Click the Deceased option;
- Click NEXT;
- In the resulting right-hand panel, click CREATE PERSON.
Rinse and repeat.
In my previous comment, I referred to the user's grandfather. He is not on the McConnell line. I have just looked at a similar experiment, starting with the user's grandmother who is a McConnell. I expanded her ancestry back a number of generations until the early 1600s. Again, the process became hopelessly slow (not the fault of FS or the browser; just the sheer volume of data that the browser was processing). At that point, I stopped and counted the number of lowest-level "u" profiles in the oldest generation only. It came to around 100.
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@JulianBrown38 That makes perfect sense.
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I came back here for the first time in several weeks, and was pleased to see the u's removed! So I started looking around, to see if they had all been removed, and found Mary's husband Robert! More added just today, October 15 - malfunctioning tool?
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I'm now getting 404's for both of the links you provided in the original post, and I get a 'Person Not Found / This person does not exist, has been removed, or is restricted in FamilySearch.' message for those I've checked of the profiles I reviewed before (e.g. P794-131, for which the Person API now gives a 403, indicating that 'is restricted in FamilySearch' would be the right interpretation here).
So it looks like FS has taken steps to clean up the 'u's, which is good to see.
But if I run my search (above) again, I get quite a few new 'u's, all apparently created by the same user as previously, at least one (P72J-ZRZ) yesterday.
@Ashlee C. action needed again please …. looks like whatever guidance the user received has not got through.
(I have also flagged Rob's latest post for moderator attention marked 'Other', which seemed the best of the new flagging options here.)
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@MandyShaw1 Well that's bazaar! At first glance, the URL's are perfectly correct, but a more careful examination reveals that both have extended the link to include the following comma or period, which causes them to fail. I'm almost positive they worked before, and I certainly would not have included subsequent punctuation. I don't see a way to edit and correct that any more.
When you remove the comma/period, you'll see that Mary is still clean, but Robert has gained an ancestry of u's, with one tiny change - his father has gotten an uncapitalized last name.0 -
Thank you for bringing this new information to our attention. The new information has been reported.
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