No Response to an Added Note
I'm stymied in my search for relatives past this person: PS1Y-YP5
I added a note, but have received no responses to date. Is there some way to make it past this impass? The Note is here: https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/collaborate/PS1Y-YP5
Is there a better way for me to call attention to this entry needing to be repaired/clarified?
Thanks in advance.
Answers
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@M65062
Many people don't revisit profiles regularly or have the "following" option enabled. If you want to contact another contributor, you may have better success using the Chat/Private Message option.0 -
Most likely you are just going to have to fix this yourself. The place to start is the Change Log. Until they fix the new Change Log, it is best in this situation to use the old Change Log so you can see how a person was originally created.
In the Latest Changes box, click on Show All then scroll down to the very first entry. There you will see that just this past June, a user created this profile for Thomas Black with birth in 1490. A child John with birth year 1520 was added. Then his wife and the mother of John, Agnes Ann Littleton born 1500 was added. That was all that was done. Unfortunately this user did not add any sources to support any of this.
The following day, a different user came along and declared that Thomas Black was not Thomas Black but rather Humphry Richards Blake (later reduced to Humphry Blake) who was born in 1494. Still no sources and no explanation other than "wrong family." That user also added death information.
The five days later that second user changed his name back to Thomas Black and changed his birth information to 1490 and moved his birth place.
Now things get really confusing. A third user has gotten involved and that user did a bunch of relationship changes and put a different Humphry Blake as the father of Thomas Black, removed Thomas' wife and made her the wife of Humphry and so Thomas' mother.
Then user #2 gave Thomas a new wife.
Again all of this was done without any sources attached anywhere. So your job will be to start with that son John who does have two sources on him (with a third one that looks like it is probably a duplicate) and learn all you can about him, paying attention to the Alert Note on his profile. Try get more on his profile than just a birth year, death year, and Scotland entered. Make sure his wife and children are correct. Some of his children have a lot of sources so there may actually be good support for the family. Then see if there is any support in any of that to say who John's parents really are. Use the information you find to get sources on those parents.
I suspect that after all that, you will likely find that you just need to remove Thomas from being a child of Humphrey and Agnes because as things are now, he cannot possibly belong there. When you do, be sure to give a full, complete statement about your actions.
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It's probably not that relevant to @M65062 's query but if you Google "Humphrey Blake Agnes Littleton genealogy" (no quotes) there are some interesting results from other researchers. In particular the entries on Wikitree and Geni.com refer to "fraudulent genealogy invented by Horatio Gates Somerby in the mid 1800s". The Wikitree article in particular references research published in major American genealogy journals.
I only tried them because their names looked a little more unusual - those research articles might at least put the connection to Thomas Black to bed. As if being born before his parents wasn't enough.
As an aside, known families living before parish registers (in England and Wales) tend to be fairly important and appear in things like Heralds' Visitations, which makes them good (but not certain) candidates to appear in Google search results.
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If there's no source, it's fiction. If there's no source, the dates don't make sense, the names don't align, they didn't live in the same country, and all these changes were made within the last couple months without a single source being provided means these aren't changes that warrant any respect or should be allowed to remain in the tree.
Humphrey Blake L56H-Y2N already has a spouse named Agnes (no maiden name given) and a son named Thomas born about 1527 attached. Reputable sources are scarce, but apparent Thomas Blake (not Black) is named in Humphrey's will.
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@RTorchia It would be good to see 'If there's no source, it's fiction' added as a banner to every Person page in FamilySearch.
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Such a banner would terribly oversimplify the situation because there is a huge difference between no sources and no source citations.
A key resource for information about my wife's ancestors is Ola Høyland's Stord Bydgebok: Gards of Ættesoga. Eight hundred and nineteen pages of meticulous work covering the inhabitants of Stord, Norway, from the early 1600s to the mid-1900s. There is not a single source citation in the book. His sources are clearly the parish registers, tax records, land records, court records, and census records for the area but he didn't cite any of these. As we go through and add the sources we have access to out of all the sources he used, his accuracy is about 99.99%. So I trust his information taken from sources we don't have access to. His book isn't fiction.
A user in Family Tree might well have dozens of sources for what they record in Family Tree and just not bothered to add citations because he views it as too much work or unnecessary "because I know it is accurate."
Lack of sources on Family Tree profiles does not make that information fiction. It just makes it really hard to reproduce. You can't go from the statement "Fictitious information won't have sources" (Such as a man having a child four years before that man was born.) to "Information without source citations is fiction." Mainly because you cannot say "Information without source citations doesn't have sources."
Getting back to the original point of this post, @M65062 you should take a look at the extensive notes on John Black and Humphrey Blake where you will see that there are known extensive problems with past research on these families that others are actively working on. You should contact the users who have put on all those notes.
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Fair.
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Sorry if that was more aggressive than it needed to be. I'm dealing with somebody who is insisting that nobody is allowed to remove their best-guess unsourced info unless it can be disproven. (Then calling me names when I do disprove it.) I'm sure a lot of folks here have dealt with the same.
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Indeed - happened just today.
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I agree that calling someone names instead of providing good sources isn't a very good method of documentation. I'd take that as good proof they agree the information is fictitious but have some reason for really wishing it was true. Pride in their own fantasies? Imagined social status? Required for a $10,000,000 inheritance?
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@Gordon Collett That's the really baffling part to me. He's upset because by removing the disproven parents, I am 'disrupting their ability to find their ancestors'. Like, they want to spin their wheels researching unrelated people? And he goes on: "Without solid birth records all that anyone can do is make an educated guess about parentage. They agree with that approach. I know you don't like it, but it is an acceptable method of doing genealogy." ("They" in this case being — allegedly — FS support.)
He ends by saying "Luke is obviously related to the Dillon family in Ireland. Nobody knows who his parents are. We are linking him to the most likely parents and grandparents." Then he rebuilt the same exact relationships.
(In case you're curious, the family he's trying to link to are nobility — the line is very well-documented and doesn't fit what's been added here. But he's rejecting all that because it doesn't include a birth record for the person he's trying to link.)
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@RTorchia Yes, similar here. I'm sure my Irish famine-era ancestors didn't leave a $10 million estate, so it's not that. The other contributor reported ME to support, and I've been reprimanded. Meanwhile, this is a sample of what that contributor is doing.
Those profiles all had full names and dates yesterday.
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I am speechless, especially about FS Support's attitude in both cases. No wonder things like this don't apparently count as abuse.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile Oof. Hopefully that damage can just be reverted.
Yeah, same here with the report being filed against me, although I'm a little curious to see how they'll respond since he reported that I was tearing things up without evidence, when pretty much all my changes have been based on sources I'm adding to profiles that had none before.
Eh, anyway, good luck and keep on fighting the good fight!
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@RTorchia I was amazed at the quick response. The other contributor was annoyed with me on Saturday, and I already received the reprimand on Sunday. It was clear from the email I received that the story had been distorted.
Good luck to you as well.2
