Please Read These Improvement Suggestions!

LegacyUser

Barb Dubs said: Numerous suggestions:
1) when selecting residence from census record, it should already be standardized.
2) ditto for dates.
3) please remove the “reason this info is correct” as it is completely redundant. The idea is to “attach” record to the person.
4) 90% of the time, the “linked” record is not standardized. Create a way to educate users of this importance.
Finally, is there a demo/teaching tool available on your website for users?

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: 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.

When making requests, each request needs to be placed in its own message thread.

1 - Whenever I (a user like yourself) selects a census record, I almost always have to edit the place. For later U.S. enumerations, there is often a street address associated with the record of my relatives. In editing the place, including adding details from the enumeration page, such as the date of the enumeration (not the date applied to the census), any automated "standardizing" is taken care of at that time.

2 - See above.

3 - Why did you select this particular record? Is it of your family? Or do you only think it is of your family? The whole purpose behind all reason statements is to find out why you selected that particular record.

The most frustrating part about finding a misapplied source is no reason statement given. It is very helpful if the user who attached the record let the rest of us know why the user selected that particular reason. It may be apparent to the user, but we are not mind readers.

4 - If you look at the date for many records which have not had standards applied (and there are two entries, the date will often be much earlier, perhaps even going back to when the previous system's records were integrated into FamilySearch.

Finally, The Family History Guide (http://thefhguide.com/) is an approved training guide for not only FamilySearch, but it also has training for several other sites.

FamilySearch is still being developed. As such, the limited resources for this free site are concentrated on continuing to develop the site, fix issues, and provide additional tools for our use in preparing a true history (not just the raw facts of birth, marriage, and death) of each of our relatives.

Engineers are notorious for not documenting what they have done. In preparing documentation when I worked in the computer industry, I often had to interview engineers especially where code was involved. This applies to the development teams for FamilySearch, as well.