Please stop allowing people to edit family trees without the agreement of whom it belongs to
LegacyUser
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Eva Vollbrecht said: Please put something in place, that prevents strangers from changing things in your family tree. Perhaps only allow combining trees with the agreement of both parties and don't allow people to edit things in someone elses tree without this agreement. Someone edited my family tree and put wrong data in it. This should not be possible in my opinion.
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David Newton said: You have fundamentally misunderstood this site. For the dead it is one, combined tree. There is a private area that exists for the living for each user but everyone has the same access to edit the dead. There is no my tree and your tree; it is all our tree.0
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A van Helsdingen said: As David says, the FamilySearch Family Tree (FSFT) is a "One World Tree". This means everyone contributes towards a single family tree for all humanity. No one owns or controls any profile. But you can "watch" a profile, which means you get emails when someone makes edits to it.
If you don't want to be involved in this, but would rather have your own family tree, then there are a number of websites and software programs that offer options for this.0 -
Tom Huber said: First, welcome to the community-powered feedback forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.
The following may help. As you read through it, you will likely realize that a lot of people come to FamilySearch with the same issue you have.Introducing FamilySearch Family Tree
FamilySearch FamilyTree is a single tree that is a collaborative effort, built around an open-edit model, allowing any person, including yourself to add to and make changes on any person who lived throughout history, including all of our deceased relatives.
There is no "my tree" in FamilySearch FamilyTree — it is a tree for all mankind. If you have found errors, you need to know why those errors are there. It could be that someone incorrectly combined another person's record with your relative. It could be that someone found a source that they thought applied to your relative, but it did not. It could be that someone just knew that their information was correct and entered that.
There are sites that support independent trees and building them. FamilySearch is not one of those sites.
If you are unfamiliar with how to work with the massive tree (now containing over 1.2 Billion persons), The Family History Guide (http://thefhguide.com/) is an approved training resource. It not only contains procedures for working with the site and the massive tree, but also exercises for you to use.
As to the incorrect information -- Those who make changes usually believe they are related to the person for which they are making changes. Their changes may be valid, invalid, or contain errors and may lack support from primary and secondary source material. Or the changes may be based on misinformation, or information that was copied from an unreliable source.
The desire to belong to an elite group of people, such as Mayflower Descendants, the Daughters of the American Revolution, or the Sons of the American Revolution has likewise produced some inventive genealogies.
Not all participants who add to and make changes to existing material have the same level of knowledge and experience. Novices or Newbies often try their best to be useful, but they can and will make mistakes (even us old-timers can make mistakes), some of which are going to cause concern. Others are convinced that their information is factual, despite not having primary or secondary sources that validate their information.
While this can be frustrating, remember that everyone has been at one time or another in their lives, or is now, a novice or newbie. I remember what it was like for me, now over fifty years ago.
To minimize the changes others make to the tree, there are several things that I have found to be largely effective, given the nature that many inappropriate changes are being made by people who are new to FamilySearch FamilyTree, or do not work with the tree on any kind of regular basis.
1. I make sure every deceased person I work with in the tree is fully sourced with citations that can be used to locate original records, not only with sources from FamilySearch Historical Records, but also from other sites as well as material that may not be available online. I also add whatever stories exist about that person and provide sources for those stories. The more information I can include, the less likely someone will come along and make changes.
I make sure that every conclusion (fact) that is in a person's record actually ap… [truncated]0 -
Eva Vollbrecht said: Thank you for this guide. It is indeed quite helpful.0
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Eva Vollbrecht said: First of all, thank you for replying so quickly. I actually did not know about this 'one tree for all' idea. That of course explains a lack of privacy settings for the trees. Still I find it very frustrating to find branches of 'my' tree with false information in them. But I suppose theres is nothing much I can do about that, except working through the errors one by one to correct them.1
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Adrian Bruce said: Thank you Eva for understanding and accepting the undoubted issues. Nobody's asking us to like it - but we do have to accept it or give up and go elsewhere.0
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David Newton said: Source them, standardise them and get rid of obvious junk: there's nothing further you can do to help things except keep an eye on them.0
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W David Samuelsen said: When you do find wrong information, you can edit it, but please send message to that person who put in wrong information in a nice way why it is wrong.0
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Don M Thomas said: Yea, she could go to Family Tree Lite, just to do Temple work on her ancestors if she is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
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Don M Thomas said: This sister has a legitimate complaint!
Why do we as a people, spend millions, if not possibly billions, in the preservation of historical records, to obtain the most accurate information on our ancestors, and then put it in a totally OPEN EDIT "wild west" database called the FamilySearch "Family Tree," to where anyone can change our ancestors records?
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ATP said: Don M Thomas,
"Wild west", indeed!0
This discussion has been closed.