leaving Family Search
I am so frustrated with non-members going in to change my information. I change it back and add resources and this one in particular who calls themselves "everyone" deletes my resources and inserts their own again. I do not feel very saintly when I have to interact with people who think that the site is theirs and they have full control over what goes on it. I am going to move my tree to ancestry.com where my tree is never changed and use family search only for additional info that might be added. I am tired of repeatedly reinputting my info - I feel like I will never get the work done for my ancestors - hopefully in the future there will be a member to continue the work that I have done for 30 years now.....
Comments
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FamilySearch FamilyTree (FSFT) is a "one world" tree, meaning the aim is to create a single family tree of all humanity. No one owns any of the information about deceased people on the tree. Any FamilySearch user can edit the tree, and a majority of FS users are not members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Thousands of non-members of the LDS church help FS by donating money and volunteering at Indexing (I am one of them) and at FHCs. Remember too that non-LDS users cannot see information about ordinances in the FSFT and many have no idea about what they are. Be patient if a non-LDS user makes an edit that causes issues relating to ordinances for the dead.
If you have a dispute with another user about facts or information, you can use the built-in communication features to discuss this with them. Make sure to always back up assertions with sources and evidences. Only if the other person is a vandal, acting in bad faith or is very incompetent or careless is FS likely to intervene and sanction that user. What you describe- a person using a fake name and deleting all of your sources- may be serious enough for FS to take action if you can prove that you have tried to resolve the situation yourself. FamilySearch's communication systems are currently being revamped. It may be best to post a comment to this thread asking that a FS staff member or moderator sends a private message to you on this forum so that you can discuss your specific issue further.
You can "watch" people on the FSFT, and this is a very good way to be alerted to vandalism or incorrect edits to your relatives.
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You can contact the Church Temple department and ask them to put a lock on the record.
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You can have any user name that you want to. I've seen many user names that are not people's real names. A user name "every one" isn't a fake name. It is just the name that the user chose to use.
Have you looked at the sources and reasonings that the other user puts on the changes they make? Are you in disagreement with their sources? Or are you in argument with the user because they changed how you entered in the information? I suggest that you work with them to find the best information for the person in the Tree in question.
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Oh, Amy - if only collaboration with some Family Tree users were so easy!
People are being caused real pain here, with careless individuals causing hours, if not days, work in having us to correct their dreadful work. Of course there are some who are willing to reason and collaborate, but read some of the awful experiences posted here and you'll appreciate how this is often far from being the case.
As far as user names like "everyone" is concerned, I would not feel comfortable communicating with a user with such a name: it gives me the impression that the person is saying , "I can see who you are, but you'll never be able to track me down!"
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"non members" . . .
LDS members are just as much the cause of problem as anyone else - please dont take the attitude that its mainly non members. . . .
[ an LDS member]
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In my experience the behavior described by @LaNieta usually happens when a contributor does not know how to create a new person ID but they find a PID that almost fits. Maybe FT offered the PID to them in a hint. They do a make-over on that PID.
How I respond is I make them a new PID and put on it all the information they contributed, then attach that PID to the contributor's family. That is a win-win solution for all concerned.
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This is a widespread problem and the issues I'm seeing most are:
- Inexperienced researchers who don't understand sourcing or evaluating evidence;
- "Scoopers" who grab family trees from other sites or publications that are unsourced and often filled with errors and then add the information to Family Tree;
- Users who dump in GEDCOM data and add names or merge incorrectly;
- Users who are consumed with going back to famous/prominent individuals or who just want to say they go back xx years and don't really care if it is correct;
- People adding nicknames in quotation marks or alternate names to names because they are frustrated at the amount of real estate Alternate Names take up when they print family group sheets;
- People making changes without any source documentation or rationale at all.
Trying to resolve the issues is very difficult. Too often, when I try to message a submitter to try to collaborate, they don't respond. I believe a majority of them aren't even aware that there is a Messaging feature in FamilySearch. I have requested an enhancement that would show a pop-up when a user logs in that they have private messages. Not sure if it will get implemented, but I tried!
Regarding asking Support to intervene when someone repeatedly changes a well-sourced individual and who has no evidence their information is correct, they likely won't help.
I have been told by Support that there are very specific instances when FamilySearch will intervene and none of them have to do with data integrity. They can be found here:
We definitely need some type of arbitration!!
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I've encountered people who don't know how to fix errors - whether they caused them or someone else did - or they think someone else did. So that person changes all the names to Delete Delete or worse.
When the breadcrumbs are fresh, I fix, if I can find the info easily. I report in other cases. Sometimes (once) the offending user was removed. Most of the time, the mess just remains.
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We definitely need some type of arbitration!!
Although I see the same behaviors I also see no need for any type of arbitration. I see it all getting sorted out. I focus on the long game and use my time and energy to best effect by avoiding contention. Most of the contentions here will solve themselves without my lifting a finger.
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The last time I heard that argument ("Most of the contentions here will solve themselves without my lifting a finger.") was when an LDS Church member was talking about the situation all being resolved "come the millennium".
It has been calculated that the majority of Family Tree users are not even members of the Church. Regardless, I feel most FT users that are (LDS) will still have the empathy you appear to be sadly lacking in your refusal to acknowledge the pain being felt (and so regularly reported) by "LDS" and "non-LDS" alike.
I would not wish this pain on you (e.g. as I recently experienced when a user completely changed the names on IDs that clearly related to the individuals for whom they had been created), but would kindly ask you to at least hold a little empathy for those who desire Family Tree to be a project of which they can have pride. With the current open-edit format, it could quite easily descend into a work of fiction. Certainly, this could quickly happen if none of us lifted a finger to correct the glaring errors that we encounter.
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@Paul W: Ha ha. My long game is more on the scale of months.
My empathy actually is over-developed. I feel 3 kinds of pain:
- The pain of those who complain about bad edits, especially those who attribute FT behavior to others.
- The pain of those who unknowingly do bad edits and are harshly abused, insulted, maligned for it.
- The pain of having my feed here stuffed with so much complaining, fuming, and flouncing. This is the big one!
All of this pain is so unnecessary. Being aggravated (or not) is a choice. Family Tree is a work in progress and like Jim Tanner says the point is progress not (premature) perfection.
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Clearly, you aren't working on some of the lines I am where someone comes along almost weekly and completely trashes the complete, well-sourced, line. These folks don't cite any sources or enter any rationale. They just grab an Ancestry tree or a bad published tree and enter it. It takes 3 or 4 of us many hours to clean up the mess. The change logs on those folks are ridiculously long.
In some families, users have morphed the names of one individual into a totally different person. Add to that the serious design flaw that changes every instance of the name in the change log to whatever the current name is and you have no clue who the original person was or who made changes for what person. There are instances where I don't even know who the original person was who received temple ordinances. This is not good!
I have chosen to STOP adding information unless I need to add it for temple work. I have stopped adding source documents (of which I have added over 3,000 this year), and I have stopped trying to fix the trashed families on all but one of my lines.
In one of my family research groups, there are 4 of us who joke that 15 minutes after we die, our family trees will be garbage again. And it will be! So long as FamilySearch keeps handing keys to the car to people who don't even know what a steering wheel is, it is going to be dump worthy on many, many family lines.
There are ways to help alleviate the problem. Some of those include:
- Point-of-use pop-up helps (similar to the field helps in Indexing);
- Requiring users to take mini-lessons prior to using on how to format a name, enter a place, merge without destroying a change log, and what is and is not sufficient documentation to use for sources.
- Reinforce appropriate use on sourcing using check boxes for the type of source being attached (if not from FamilySearch) and warnings when someone cites just another family tree or GEDCOM file as their source.
- Broader abuse categories that include repeatedly making huge changes to families with no sources, evidence, or rationale.
I have only so many hours to contribute to this world before I die. I choose not to spend them in an endless groundhog day of fixing genealogy junk.
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Clearly, you aren't working on some of the lines I am where someone comes along almost weekly and completely trashes the complete, well-sourced, line.
Actually I am, but only temporarily.
I work on numerous lines descended from early American colonial ancestors, several with published pedigrees that are in part imaginary. I have learned very effective methods to fix them so they stay fixed:
- Attach sources.
- Properly standardize dates and place names. This stops FT from making so many bad hints and matches.
- Work other, unrelated, look-alike families that have been causing trouble.
- Work all parents, siblings, other spouses, and children of every person marrying into the family.
- Leave brief explanatory notes on trouble-prone profiles: "Caution, there are two persons with the same name, age, etc., easily confused" followed by the PIDs.
- Express no criticism of anyone.
The result is brilliant.
Don't believe me? Want to see for yourself?
John Clough (1613-1707) L2VM-FFH was the first constant mess I worked on. His descendancy is enormous and his family of origin is not known, so he gets more than his share of attention. When I first heard about the mess from a lunch buddy, the regulars were devoting so much time to edit warring with mess-makers that they had not managed to attach the many sources. There was a general consensus that attaching sources would be time wasted because his tree would always be trashed. No time to do it right because all time spent doing it over, right? Nope. Once the regulars ignored the mess-making and just did the above tasks, there was peace. Now John Clough's profile, once a hot spot for trouble, can go for months without any changes.
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We have been doing all 6 of these things regularly. We have used the Life Sketches to put CAUTION notes. Every contact with a submitter is positive, offers collaboration, and provides evidence and directions on where to find any attached supporting documents. Has not worked.
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My sympathies!
Although the example I gave has caution notes in the Life Sketch, those are an abomination. I just have ignored that residue so far. They offend me, and if I'm offended I am sure many other readers are even more offended.
Offers of help are dicey with newcomers. The first thing they are likely to think is "What's the catch? Are they going to send me a $$ invoice?" I don't offer collaboration, and I don't tell them what to do. I just barge in and do what I want, which is build the tree.
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Yep, like Sheryl I follow exactly what you itemise in "1 - 5". I only wish I could be less harsh when I comes to your point "6", but at least (whatever I am thinking) I send polite messages to those who waste my time - primarily, by their completely ignoring all the sources, reason statements and Collaboration notes I have added to the prime person and their relatives..
Ironically, my biggest problems are with the very IDs on which I have spent so much time. For example, say I have a relative named James Young. I will go through as many "James Young" IDs that I can find, who bear at least some resemblance to my relative. Some have already been incorrectly merged with individuals named James Young, but who (sources show) never left their particular corners of England. Others I work on proactively, in an attempt to ensure they are not confused with others of "similar" identity. Do this work? Sure it helps, but it certainly only reduces the hours I spend in remedying careless errors.
I could probably give you examples like your John Clough, where I have experienced no further problems. However, my Thomas Payne of Suffolk still constantly gets confused with numerous other individuals of that name - who probably never went anywhere near Suffolk in their lives!
So, I guess we'll never manage to agree on this topic. Elsewhere, I find many of your responses to be really helpful and would not have expressed things better myself - so this is nothing "personal"! It's all down to our different, personal experiences of working in Family Tree, I suppose. In my ten years of working with the program, I have found much of my work completely undisturbed. So, sorry if I'm moaning so much about those odd periods - regularly involving up to a couple of days work - when, in spite of all my efforts, other users still manage to keep me away from being able to use my time so much more productively!
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@Paul W , I sympathise! When you fix a profile do you also scrutinize the sources attached to all involved PIDs? I sometimes find strange behavior in the sources, where I thought I removed a source from a PID but somehow it is still attached. So when something is wonky I detach sources, refresh, and comb through the source list, detaching again.
For even deeper cleaning I go to the Linker page for that source and use the left Change menu to get that black triangle with "!", then click Detach. Detach will display all the attachments of source to record. There should never be more than one. (A source is a single instance of a personal name in an historical record, attached to a PID.)
I think there is a software bug in the works. This past weekend I found a PID where the same source was attached 3X. Not 3 copies of the same source, but 3X attachment of 1 copy.
When I examined @Sheryl Neal Slaughter 's UK problem PID I found some of the above and I also found a source that FT was by default faux-standardizing to an event place in the United States. That would cause problems with FT hints.
Next time I find a source attached multiple times I will try to remember to screen shot it for you all and the engineers. It must be a bug in the software because I cannot find any way I can create such multiple attachments.
Paul, if you send me the PID of your Thomas Payne of Suffolk I will take a look for you.
For all those still reading: What bothers me most about the griping here is that most of it is personal attacks on other contributors when in my experience 99% of problems described have root cause in the FT software not the intent or acts of contributors. I am a frequent filer of bug reports and have been very impressed with how fast the FT engineers are to fix the problems I report.
FT engineers: For high quality bug reports please consider using the wiki issue reporting tool on the FS research wiki.
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@dontiknowyou wrote:
A source is a single instance of a personal name in an historical record, attached to a PID.
Sorry, pedant mode has been triggered.
An index-based source on FamilySearch is a single instance of an indexed personal name based on a historical record, attached to a PID.
(This indexed persona may not bear any resemblance to a real person. My favorite example of such is based on the baptismal record of my spouse's great-grandmother's sister-in-law, where the indexer ignored the father, performed a sex change on the mother to make a father, and created a mother out of the father's religion and occupation.)
In the rest of the genealogy universe, a source is the location of one or more genealogical clues that lead to a conclusion. In a good genealogy, a citation indicating this location and its contents is attached in some way to the conclusion(s) that it leads to.
Even on FamilySearch, not all sources (which are really citations of sources) are index-based. I work predominantly with unindexed images as my sources, and I cite them with the same citation on multiple profiles All The Time.
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Don't ever apologize for citing correct form.
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The fact that often an index record is not involved is exactly why I worded my definition the way I did:
A source is a single instance of a personal name in an historical record, attached to a PID.
The whole point of indexing is to break complex into its constituent parts, to "atomize" it. Turn a sheet (or two) of census enumeration into a separate record for each household, and within each household a separate record for each person. Marriage records can get much more complicated. How many times does the groom's name appear? If it is written out on the license and again on the return by a clerk, and he signs it too, is that 3 instances or 2 or 1? But for most readers here, those details don't matter; I gave an operative definition.
Have you thought about studying all those marriage officiants and census enumerators? Their names are on many historical records but for the most part we ignore them.
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@dontiknowyou, not all genealogical sources contain personal names. For example, I've cited gazetteers and maps as evidence that I've got the right place.
You are overcomplicating matters when you start worrying whether a marriage record is 1 or 3 sources for the groom's name.
A marriage record is a source. You cite it by identifying its nature and location, hopefully in such a way that both you and others can easily locate it again. (It's a good idea to also include a transcription or summary of its contents, because sometimes things become inaccessible, and because with a transcription, it's easier for you or others to verify your reading of the material.)
The citation does not need to change based on which of the clues it contains you're using it for. Whether you're using it to document the groom's name or the address of a witness, the nature, location, and content of a marriage record doesn't change.
The desire for a one-to-one correspondence between indexes and profiles is an artificial construct unique to FamilySearch, and it makes some things unnecessarily difficult. For example, marriage witnesses are almost never indexed, making it necessary to use complicated workarounds to cite a marriage record on the profile of one of the witnesses. (If an image has index entries associated with it, no matter how incomplete the index, the image cannot be cited on FS the normal way. It has to be treated the same as an "outside" source from elsewhere on the internet.)
What it boils down to is that FamilySearch operates under a basic misunderstanding: because they're machine-parsable, FS considers indexes to be primary data. However, no matter how you massage things, indexes are only a finding aid for the actual data. Unfortunately, this is such a deep-seated error that I don't expect it to ever be fixed.
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If you mean to discuss a topic, please do not address me.
If you mean to address me, then please consider you may be addressing someone who knows more about the topic than you do.
If we disagree that does not mean one of us is wrong.
If one of us is wrong that does not mean I am wrong.
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Next time I find a source attached multiple times I will try to remember to screen shot it for you all and the engineers. It must be a bug in the software because I cannot find any way I can create such multiple attachments.
And I found one:
There is also this one that just causes FT to spin and spin and spin:
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I am like so many here frustrated with very obvious tree changes I stopped building one. Changes being made show things like mythical people in tree lines. Further frustrating is the fact that records I found in the past are no longer found or VERY difficult to find again versus when I started on this site over 20 yrs. ago.
And another thing, as I was searching my grandfather today, some one made up or mixed him up with another person with same name, wrote a narrative of his life under the discovery tab saying he was married to another person other than my grandmother. Had it been true ( which I don't believe it was ) my grandmother or my mother would have told me. Besides, checking your records shows the other supposed person he had married was a widow at the time he was alive and married to my grandmother.
This frustrating because you give no kind of way to add, edit or set the record straight under the "discovery" bio. When I do on my tree it becomes changed with more erroneous and or bs info.
I will move on some where elsewhere. Am done with this site and your pay site ancestry.com
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Your can't expect that records from 20 years ago will still be here. The FamilySearch website and the internet in general has completly changed in that time.
FamilySearch does not own Ancestry. They have a partnership but do not own each other.
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I fully expect that all my FamilySearch Memories - will be here 20 years from now . . .
and so far I have no reason to beleive that is not true
FS Memories are a great way to ensure that YOUR research stays in tact and unchanged by others and will stay intact decades into the future
Even things like pdf version of Family Group sheets and Pedigree charts can be uploaded from "local" "clean" databases - and at least be a permanent record - of what one person at a specific time - felt as to what was the correct version of the tree
I had numerous articles in the old community on this subject o fusing Memories to preserve intact and clean our own specific research.
unfortunately they were lost in the conversion'
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Just in the last few days, all cases have disappeared, and I have read comments by those who are distraught by the loss of the information those cases contained.
A couple of years ago, all the history of which microfilms we had borrowed and when went poof overnight when the microfilm borrowing service ended.
Nothing online is guaranteed to be available in 5 minutes, much less in 20 years.
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Thats one of the reason I spend so much effort on FS Memoires
Of all the changing and evolving things - - which I am sure even FS Memories will evolve . . . but My FS memories have been through thick and thin and are still there . . .
I can upload Pedigree charts, Family Group Sheets, Descendants charts, photos, research notes, analysis, life histories, audio files, stories, research files, digital books, letters, documents and much much more
all with my own personal notes, conclusions and what I consider to be correct and explanations as to why (at that point in time)
so far I am not aware of any loss of my FS memories. - nor do I expect to have any. This is one area that FS is dedicated to retaining.
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You have that signed contract do you?
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its based on past experience of the last 10 years or more - I dont think I've lost a single file in that time (even though FS has changed dramatically during that time)
and its based on direct conversations with the people who run FS Memories leadership - and the vision for the future
and based on the entire goal and spirit of FamilySearch.
and based on the fact that the people who subsidize FamilySearch will be around for many decades to come - (its not just some business that will come and go)
check out:
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