User interface problems.

LegacyUser

Michael Lock said: I am finding bits and pieces of my family all over and some entries are incorrect or compromised. The standardize date and location especially location can lose information. The software could parse sep into September. There are hamlets and towns that used to be addresses in the past, their names may have changed or they don't fit the new postal codes. The standardization obliterates the history. Also where an event occured BMD is not the same as where the record was registered.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: With the standardization issue, you cannot standardize every possible entry, however you can standardize most everything and try to include dates for when that was a standard. You do not need to standardize locations all the way.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: First, welcome to the community support 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.

Standardization is attempting to set the standard name for a place by the date of the event. The effort is extensive and will require a lot of work.

Your message involves the Authorities and Standards FamilySearch teams. They welcome your feedback and help to improve FamilySearch Places, but do not always spot all requests and concerns. As such, they have asked us to send requests or concerns involving adding or improving entries in FamilySearch places to PlaceFeedback@familysearch.org.

Questions and requests about places are assigned to the team member best qualified to respond. Once the request is in their queue, the team member will respond in the order received and as time permits.

Getting back to your original comment about place names. If you have information that can help establish place names by date, the place feedback teams will welcome any help you can provide.

As far as place names go, the entries have two entries. One is the actual place, which may or may include details such as addressed and apartment numbers, whereas the standardized place will contain the standard that can be found in the standards list.

Once a user-entered place agrees with the standard, a special symbol appears at the beginning of the place that is displayed. If it does not agree, then that symbol does not appear at the beginning of the place displayed.

Users should not (but are often not aware) attempt to set the user entry to the standard if the user entry is more specific in detail. They should try to make sure that the standard set is for the place in the user entry and if not, then the standards team should be contacted with detailed information regarding the place.

I believe you are addressing places in Europe and there are some major issues with the standards for the UK, etc., that are not as problematical as places in the United States of America (though there are some problems with U.S. places, as well).

Others involved with UK research are in a better position to address those issues.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: May I respectfully disagree. I feel the interface works great. However, there is a long standing problem of communication and an unfortunate non-standard use of the term "standardize" so that far too many users of FamilyTree still do not understand what it means to standardize dates and places.

In Family Tree, standardize does not mean "set all dates and place names to the standard version of that date or place." It means "link all dates and place names to the best standard version of that date or place currently available, moving up geographical levels as needed."

Some of us are concerned that the map pin notation made things worse. The presence of the map pin does not mean the place is standardized correctly. It only means that the adjacent place name will be mapped exactly on the timeline map. The lack of a map pin does not mean the place name is not standardized. It only means that an upper level portion of the place name as found in the standard linked to the name will be mapped instead of the actual place.

For example this entry is standardized as designated by the green check mark:



This will never have a map pin because this Apartment 5 is too fine of detail to ever be in the place standards database. The best mapping will be of Dallas as a whole as shown by the standardized version of the place.

This place name is entered correctly and is in complete accordance with how Family Tree is suppose to work.

Regarding your other concern that bits and pieces of your family are scattered all over with various quality of data, this is because of the origins and history of Family
Tree. The Family Tree database was first constructed from every bit of submitted, extracted, and contributed data collected by Family Search ever since the creation of the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1894. As you can image, methods for recording genealogical information have changed many times since then. The first computerized version of this information did not allow family-linking. That is, each individual data entry contained either a person's name, birth information, and parents or a person's name, marriage date, and spouse, not both, and was not linked to any children or siblings of the person. Later versions, such as the old Ancestral File did allow for linking in families. Also, there was a lot of duplication in these files. As stated, all this was dumped together in one big pile and it is now up to us to clean up, correct, and merge all this data so each person in the tree has one and only one record, properly linked to all parents, spouses, and children.

LegacyUser

Michael Lock said: I thank everyone for their thoughtful answers. I am new to Family Search. The bits and pieces, I mentioned, are probably created by someone I am related to. But some is from old paper records that various people have transposed, thank you. Mistakes are made in these transpositions. There are also mistakes in original documents. Since posting my original gripes, I have connected 2 branches of my family. There are some ancestors with either different first names or misspelled. I have seen census records which misspell a certain great great granduncle's name. They destroyed his name several different ways back in 1841 and 1851. His name which is Ebenezer is spelt "Ebenzer" on Family Search I would like to know how to fix this and other name problems. Thank you all.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: In the other section for a person's record, this is the option to enter alternative spellings that are found on various records.

Ebenezer can be spelled a number of ways and even shortened to Eben and Eb. I would consider and record those as nicknames (one of the alternate options). Generally speaking, record the birth name in the vitals section and later variations in the "other" section as an alternate name.

Here is an article that you may find useful: https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

You may also find this useful:
https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

Finally, an excellent training tool, which has been approved for use with FamilySearch is the Family History Guide at http://thefhguide.com/. It also has informatoin pertaining to several other genealogical sites, such as Ancestry.