Wrongly deleted people cannot then be found and likely lost forever or until created again.
Using search I found person A created by familysearch from baptism records with no changes, this person I recognized and placed on my tree unchanged. (I now realize I should have added further details and "followed" this person at this point, but I am a new user.)
Another user made WRONG changes to birth, baptism, parents, and sources of person A.
This user then WRONGLY MERGED the person A with another person B, same birth year, father's name and parish, but separately identified in parish and census records, easily done.
This caused the modifed person A to be deleted.
The original person A will be now be lost and not found by search - remember the deleted person A (if still held in your system) now has the wrong birth, baptism and parents and source details. (By pure luck I saw this error as they had an erroneous photo, and I was able to restore person A and I believe rectify all the wrong changes to details.)
If I had not restored them, the original and truly existing Person A would be lost forever to anyone searching fresh. I believe this has happened a lot as I seem to need to create many people whom I am sure familysearch would have found earlier.
I suggest that, if a person is deleted then all changes made before deletion should be reversed and that person restored so others can find them.
Perhaps just all changes made by the user doing the delete should be reversed and then the person restored.
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I am a new user so I hope this is in the right category.
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There are some ways you can find a deleted record - particularly if you know it came from a previous system. Some are recoverable and some are not. If you search Genealogies you can find records from previous systems. Many of these were entered in FamilySearch when the original new FamilySearch information was seeded (started). ( A short history lesson is provided to assist with understanding).
In new FamilySearch records could be combined together so that common records (same individual) were grouped. As you would expect mistakes were made and records for more that one person were combined together. Once the system moved to Family Tree none of the original combines were available to undo. If the record you are search for was combined the only option is to make a new record of that person, (For LDS members it is possible to get ordinance information moved to the new record.
In Family Tree the terminology is merge and information is retained in a change log therefore most merges can be undone (ie the deleted record can be restored).
The records from genealogies that were used to seed the data base include (1) all of the records in Ancestral File, (2) all of the records in the International Genealogical Index (IGI) and (3) early pedigree resource file records.
Given the above short history lesson lets provide some examples of how to determine where a record from those collection resides in Family Tree. In particular if you know a record should exist (ie was in one of the earlier collections) it is possible to find the location of that record in Family Tree. Below you will find two examples. One from Ancestral File and one from the IGI. These have been chosen because they are relatively Hidden in Family Tree.
Ancestral File --- We are going to attempt to find a record for Jonathan Adams born 1671 in Massachutes with parents Joseph Adams and Abigail Baxter. The image below provides information on a record from Ancestral File that fits the criteria.
The top image is from the search window in Genealogies and the bottom from the details after clicking on Jonathan's name. Note the ID for this record is M4WG-6FD. We can use this ID to determine where this record presently resides in Family Search. Entering this ID in Family Tree (Used the recents dropdown) results in the image below:
The yellow band provide information for us. The original record was combined (new FamilySearch) into record LC3J-R9X and cannot be removed from that current record. However, the vital information seems to match the original so this is not an issue. However several merges have been completed in Family Tree and if we follow the merges we arrive at the final record - Jonathan Adams 1671 – 24 January 1718 • LT6S-HKL. This record does not contain the same parents and presently exists with 4 different mothers (3 with no spouses) Clearly some incorrect merges have been done and the original parents have been removed. I do not know enough about this individual to make any judgement as to correctness but just use as an example of how to find a record.
International Genealogical Index example
Using a similar process we will look for William Cannell born about 1747 in Kirk German, Isle of Man. The record below is from the genealogies search
Note William is shown with a spouse and 4 children on the original record. clicking on his name provides the following information
We see William with his spouse an 4 children. His ID number is MFDT-QX8 which we can again use to search in Family Tree to locate this IGI record. The result is William Cannell
4 January 1747 – 6 June 1747 • MKLL-2R4
A record for William Cannell same birth information which was combined with other records in new FamilySearch and has been merged in Family Tree to a final record. William Cannell 4 January 1747 – 6 June 1747 • MKLL-2R4. This record displays as a person who died as a child and the spouse and children have been removed. One would need to go through the changes in the merged records to determine if these changes were appropriate. Our purpose was only to show how to locate hidden records in Family Tree that came from other collections and we know were originally entered in Family Tree.
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