Changes made by FamilySearch

LegacyUser

Marc Orvin said: We see changes made with the contributor being FamilySearch. The KA tells us that this is from the old days and that the contributor information was not brought forward with the update. That may be true as far as the olden days, but current changes listing FamilySearch as the contributor are also appearing. And the reason statements they are providing do not rise to the standard set in the KA about reasons statements. Also, it would be good if when we clicked on the FamilySearch contributor it would tell us if it came from Data Quality, or Membership Support or wherever so we at least had a clue who was making these changes.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: In instances like this, please provide the ID for the person where you are seeing these changes. It will be up near the name and consist of two parts --- like XXXX-XXX.

Whenever you see FamilySearch as the contributor to a change, and the change took place after the summer of 2016, then the change took place as the result of a support case having been submitted and whatever change was the result of an investigation and conclusion.

Prior to the summer of 2016, FamilySearch FamilyTree was still "joined at the waist" with the old system and while some changes were correctly recorded in the FSFT change log, a number of changes were made during the final days prior to disconnecting the two systems.

For a while, all sorts of names were being used that sometimes indicated where, when, and which department made the change. But the situation was such that it was more confusing than helped, so everything has been lumped together under FamilySearch.

The real question is not who made the change, but if the change was good or bad. If the change was bad, then why was it bad. Was it the result of the wrong person being changed, or what?

Without knowing the PID (person ID) of the person where the change took place, we can only speculate, which never works very well.

H Dennis Abeln

Refer to Catherine Cadwallader L1NY-KMG and her five children. These six people were created in 2018 by 'FamilySearch.' No sources or other justification were offered. Why would 'FamilySearch' create people without providing justification?

I want to merge this family group with Catherine Elizabeth Conrad KFZH-55Q and her children, but there are differences that I can't reconcile. I doubt the accuracy of the L1NY-KMG group, but I can't look into it.

Paul W

This is quite an old post (from 2018), but the issue still applies.

There should be an easy-to-find KA detailing (from FamilySearch logs) the different dates which apply to this problem - along with details of the FS department responsible and reasons behind these changes / inputs.

On some occasions, the reason "FamilySearch" is shown as the contributor is that Support has made the entry, often in the process of carrying out work on a user's behalf. However, the majority of these "FamilySearch" changes can probably be traced back to a handful of dates when a program has been run to address a specific issue. The actual dates have been reported on other forums in the past, but only by observant everyday users, never (I believe) by any formal FamilySearch statement.

Dennis J Yancey

agreed -- - these FamilySearch entries are rather common (especially when FamilySearch was younger)

and there were a lot of systematic fixes and updates made by the system administrators - especially as various major upgrades to the system were made and / or possibly multiple records from disjoint collections were merged together.

in recent years I think cases like this are much less common.