Data Quality Score
Have you noticed the Data Quality Score in Family Tree? It is accessed via the FamilySearch Labs page and once activated, appears on the upper right hand side of a person's profile page. This score is a quick way to evaluate the information in a profile and can help you know where to focus your research. The score is available for ancestors born between 1800 and 1920, and helps you check for inconsistencies in names and dates as well as data completeness. It's another way to improve the information in your tree. Give it a try!
Answers
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@betsy123 surely DQS is no longer a Lab and has been automatically available to all for some time? The article you quote is a blog post so reflects the situation at the time when it was written.
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And just a couple of comments for people looking at this function for the first time:
The Data being checked is both the data on a person's profile and the data in a source. Never assume that if a conflict is flagged that the profile is wrong. In my experience, 90% of the time if there is a flag, it is because of a problem with a source. These come in various varieties:
- The source has been indexed incorrectly.
- The source has incorrect information. (My great-grandfather's third wife self-reported her age as 63 on the marriage license for her next marriage so she appeared 1 year younger than that husband rather than actually being the 18 years older than him that she was.)
- The source has currently correct information rather than historically correct information. (Others have reported that since the 1950 US census records report place of birth using the 1950 names for countries rather the country names when people were born there, a place name inconsistency is flagged.)
However, when the problem is with the profile, it has usually been a very hard to spot problem such as an error in date or place name standardization or a minor typographical error.
Also, quality is not the same as accuracy. A wrong birth day of 14 April 1920 will get a better score than a correct incomplete birth date of 1919. So even if the routine shows no problems at all, that does not mean the profile is not filled with errors.
Overall, it is a very nice feature and a good double check on the information we enter to remind us to double check and explain apparent and true inconsistencies.
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Although the page and its information were drawn from a 2025 article, the effort to explain the concept of the Data Quality Score was still valuable in helping users understand what it is and how it functions. Because information on FamilySearch evolves at a prolific pace, it’s wise to review these resources regularly for the most current guidance. Even when I’ve occasionally relied on older material by mistake, I’ve still been able to learn from it and refine my understanding.
The Data Quality Score in Family Tree can give you confidence in the sources and information about your ancestors. It can help you find areas of improvement or signal errors and inconsistencies in your family tree.
The algorithms comb through the data associated with a person in Family Tree and perform hundreds of detailed checks. Some issues you may see highlighted include things like:
A child being born before his or her mother was bornThe name of a person not matching the name on an attached source
- A person missing sources tagged to their birth
We hope you will find this feature helpful as you seek to improve the accuracy of your family tree.
The quality indicator only appears on pages for ancestors that match one of the following birth segments:
- Australia 1800 - 1855
- Australia 1856 - 1920
- Brazil 1700 - 1899
- Canada 1800 - 1920
- Colombia 1514 - 1950
- Continental Europe 1800 - 1920
- Ireland 1800 - 1844
- Ireland 1845 - 1863
- Italy 1800 - 1865
- Italy 1866 - 1920
- North America 1700 - 1799
- Mexico 1800 - 1866
- Mexico 1867 - 1920
- Norway 1800 - 1815
- Norway 1816 - 1920
- United Kingdom 1800 - 1920
- United States 1800 - 1920
- South America 1800 - 1920
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The issue here is that the original post refers to the DQS as a Labs project. It has not been a Labs project for quite some time.
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@Gordon Collett mentioned
… since the 1950 US census records report place of birth using the 1950 names for countries rather the country names when people were born there, a place name inconsistency is flagged …
I'm sure that this applies in many data sources. For instance, my probably fallible memory says that I once read instructions for compiling some documents (immigration records?) that specifically instructed that countries of birth were to be reported using the country names as at document compilation, rather than as at birth - examples were given of Germany and Italy to be used even when the birth were pre 1871 and 1861 respectively. While those happen to be the current names today, it should be relatively easy to come up with examples where the birth country, country as at immigration and country today are all different.
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The instructions to enumerators for the US census have been to use the geopolitical designation as it existed at the time of the census. And, of course, sometimes the immigrant didn't really know where the new boundary was located. Some of the counties in the northern part of Ireland are in the Republic, rather than Northern Ireland. The places of birth of my Irish ancestors are often incorrectly listed as result. As for the places of birth of the ancestors of my sister-in-law's family, from what is now Poland, don't get me started.
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