Changing others research to different languages and layouts
May I ask that if you are not a relative to NOT make sweeping changes to ones branches by changing the way names are shown or the languages they are presented? You may be wrecking years of work done by others, like someone just did to me, and people who I knew personally before they passed away. Why? What is the reasoning for this? Now in addition to stuff I would LIKE to do, I have to break and fix hundreds of names on stuff I already worked on for years.
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I feel it's very disrespectful to sweep through someones work and alter the profiles of everyone in them. I reported it to Family Search but nothing will end up happening I'm sure. I have thousands of names and people I have worked on and contributed to in my family and folks who I interviewed before they passed away and only to find today that someone swept through my branches and altered the names and languages of everything I've done. This throws everyone off now. Very discouraging and sad to say I think maybe it's time to find a stopping point and use this site as a reference only for records and worry about anything new on accounts that only I have control over and only I can edit. Too many chances for others to make errors too on here. I feel like I'm more of a security guard than a researcher anymore and it's just too much.
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I empathize with you, @StephenDespot. It is very frustrating when you have carefully researched and documented your family and entered it into the FamilySearch family tree only to have it dramatically altered. Because the family tree is a shared family tree anyone can edit/alter the information. I have come to realize after years of careful research that many people are (1) simply name and date collectors, (2) are not interested in sources, and (3) think that only their information is correct.
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and, by the way, devise "their standard" for entering the information into Family Tree instead of following the FamilySearch standards of data entry, (ie. abbreviations, adding "County" or "Co." for place names, and not entering the cemetery name for burial places), which further reinforces the idea that Family Tree is "Junk Genealogy".
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Sad to say I think I may be getting to a stopping point and using this site for refernce documents only. I can't be on guard 24/7. It's best to build on something that you can work at your leisure on and what you know. You're right though, a lot of people just try to collect names thinking they are right when everything is even still documented in front of them. You have them on other platforms too but they are making their own errors, not on something I'm trying to do.
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Yes, may be it's time to wash my hands clean of this one. I've done a lot, put a lot out there, but I want to maintain accuracy and unfortunately here it's vulnerable to potential errors by others. One of the biggest problems are these Volunteers who think they know what they are doing and think they may be helping but in reality they really aren't. They cause more problems than the beginners. They have all this time on their hands so maybe they ought to practice on their own branches?
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It's not clear to me whether you are complaining about adding "Co." or "County" into placenames or not. But if you are (if, if, if) then I would like to defend that practice from two aspects.
Firstly, the whole way that FamilySearch is programmed is that it is possible to standardise a date or placename but adjust what I refer to as the display date or display placename to add extra text (such as "County") while keeping the chosen standard. So it is working the way FamilySearch intended.
For instance, I can enter a residence (say) as "Los Angeles, California, United States", standardise it on that placename, and then alter the residence to "Los Angeles County, California, United States" while leaving it standardised on the original placename.
This is using the system as it is intended and should not be disparaged.
The second aspect of my defence is that, to the great majority of FamilySearch users, a placename that simply reads "Los Angeles, California, United States" will be understood to mean the City of Los Angeles. Very few will appreciate that it actually means, according to the standards, the County of Los Angeles, and even fewer will know that the City and the County of Los Angeles cover vastly different areas. Unlike, one might add, the City and the County of San Francisco which, the last I heard, covered exactly the same area.
Basically, to those of us on the eastern side of the Atlantic, American county names tend to be a mess - something like "Orange, Orange, California, United States" is obscure in its meaning and (face it 😉) an aesthetic disaster. "Orange, Orange County, California, United States" is much clearer.
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Hello again @StephenDespot,
Early on when FS Family Tree first became available I put in one small branch of my family tree — a total of 11 people — and immediately saw how others would make changes to well-sourced people in the tree. I realized that this did not work for me. Thus I decided to put all of my research into a stand-alone genealogy program on my home laptop. How do I share this with FamilySearch?: I self-publish various family reports from my database which include references and indexes, have them bound at my local print shop, and then donate copies to the FamilySearch Library and other genealogical libraries. I always give FamilySearch permission to digitize my reports and make them available online so others can use them for their own research. This has worked well for me and I don't have to worry about someone making edits to my careful research.
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That sounds like a good idea. I too have a program I use which works with the Ancestry.com site. Maybe just easier to build on that and use this for finding records. I've put a lot out here already but it's a lot trying to keep an eye on and the more that gets out the more it changes by others I'm afraid. I think I'm really just going to get to a point and switch gears on how I further my researching from now on.
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