Is it acceptable practice to create placeholders in a family tree?
My dad was adopted, and through DNA testing I'm pretty confident that I've identified one of his grandmothers but not at all confident who his parents were.
Is it bad practice to create a placeholder (dummy entry) for his unidentified parent in order to link to his identified grandparent?
Answers
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This is a great question Alexander! Are you referring to creating a placeholder at FamilySearch.org? Or do you mean within your own database?
I have created many trees in Ancestry for adoptees and I frequently have inserted a man named "son" or "dad" and a woman named "daughter" or "mom." These are my own private trees though. I typically don't make these searchable.
As far as making a placeholder in the FamilySearch tree, I would think it would not be a good practice.
What do others think? What do you do?
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if the tree is private not searchable to the public then I would do it
If you know the surname just put that in or as Carolyn said just put son/father etc.. with a question mark
Lynda
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Sometimes you need to do this in order to find what you are looking for. However, best practice is to do this in a private tree only. If on Ancestry make it private and searchable and it will still attract Thruline clues. This also sounds like a circumstance where you could find benefit by using WATO at dnapainter.com
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Hi all, thanks for the replies.
Sorry that my question wasn't clear. I was indeed talking about the Family Search public tree, and I suspected that 'speculative' entries were frowned upon. (I still have this irrational desire to indicate my ties to my bio ancestors somehow, but data integrity comes first)
Also, @bjnl bjnl , thanks for the tip about What Are the Odds. I knew about DNAPainter, but didn't know about that tool and will try it out. I wonder how it will handle what I suspect is some major pedigree collapse in my tree.
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Alexander ... v2 Beta is the best to use as it seems to be a big improvement on v1. Unfortunately, WATO doesn't handle pedigree collapse very well as I understand it. There is a free webinar here: https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar_details.php?webinar_id=1288
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I see a link to *a* webinar in the "tips" pop-up on the WATOv2 page. Thanks again.
sidenote: 23&Me's generated tree didn't do very well for me (presumably because of pedigree collapse); I started giving the "?" nodes in the tree names like "everything to the left of this is nonsense" 😁
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Yes ... probably the same webinar. I can't see as I am on my phone.
23andMe tree was quite accurate for me, some generational info not quite right e.g. 3C1R showing as 3C but on the whole pretty good. I can see how it would be problematic for you ... It doesn't allow you to connect a match in more than 1 way. The tree is in Beta though so hopefully will improve over time.
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