Why so many errors?
I'm using Ancestry as my primary tool. I'm finding so many errors in just the 1st & 2nd levels of my tree. I just imported the ENTIRE GEDCOM file from Ancestry.
Errors here are terrible! I'm fixing them, but I'd rather work on my Ancestry data.
I've also restarted my account on My Heritage, but it's not much better.
Where does Family Search get its data?
I've started correcting things & sending notes to those tagged as making the last change (which was wrong) … kind of a "hands off" note.
Answers
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Hi. Welcome to FamilySearch Community. Family Search was initially populated with date from some legacy systems in 2012. Since then, the input to family search is primarily from individual users like yourself. Family Search encourages that entries be backed by primary sources. However, that is not always done by various users. You have probably noticed that in Family Search we only want one profile per person and that profile is shared with everyone. Family Search is also intended to be very collaborative and we strive to get the most correct, source based profile for each individual. Your efforts to correct the profiles using sources will benefit all users. And hopefully, you can benefit is other areas by the work being done by other users. Thanks for your contribution to FamilySearch
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@jhuebner0504 The legacy systems Wayland mentions are the various database of everything contributed to FamilySearch since 1894. As such, you can imagine there is a lot of duplicate information and a lot of variation in research skills of the various contributors through that 130 year history.
Now that all that information is in one spot, we users have been given the opportunity as volunteers to clean it all up and add to it so that all the identifiable people who have ever lived can be found in one, universal database with each person having one unique profile in Family Tree.
Again, the skills of us volunteer users are at various levels. And no matter how skillful, we can all make mistakes. One common source of errors is users who do not realize that we are all working in the same tree. You mention one example being a paternal aunt that has obvious errors in her profile. This immediately brings up the question of whether another user has a grandmother of the same name and approximately the same life details and accidentally combined your aunt and his grandmother because he thought the tree only had his relatives.
Or it is possible that someone took the profile of his grandmother and put her in for your aunt, again not realizing two women could have the same name.
In any event, if you see strange things in the tree, if you post the ID number of the profile here and explain what your concerns with the profile are, often someone here can go through the Change Log and determine exactly how the profile got into its current state.
Since we are all working together, "Hands Off" notes are often not appropriate. You may have dozens of near or distant cousins working in Family Tree who, being relatives of the same people you are a relative of, do have just as much right to work on the profiles as you do.
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TY, I'll be sure to send notes to those that I know have put "bad data" in a "bush or branch" … I've already seen a few data points - things here I haven't seen on Ancestry. I know "Patience, Grasshopper." A thousand people are working on data, a thousand ways to display that same data. Working in IT for nearly 40 years has taught me PATIENCE. LOL TY VM JLH.
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