Relationship errors; how to fix erroneous submitted information
Someone has posted information about my great grandfather, his second wife and the children who are erroneously subscribed to her. He had a first wife who died as is reported by my family, during childbirth after giving birth to three other children. I can find no record of her death or burial but I wish to correct the information posted. I have already left the information of Henry B Berry's and Martha Estella Heard's page but how do we correct this permanently?
Best Answer
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Daulton, if you removed the children from the wrong mother and they are now listed under the correct parents, the "wrong" information is gone. Did we understand your question correctly? What do you mean by the "site is showing people as related to me that are not?"
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Answers
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Daulton,
We received your question about incorrect second wife.
We have attached several knowledge articles for your review that hopefully will make it easier for you to make the corrections.
also
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Regarding your concerns about your great grandfather and the issue concerning the children from his first wife. We suggest you put the information about his first wife and the children she gave birth to in the life sketch section on you great grandfather's person details page. You can find more information about a life sketch in the article, How Do I Add A Life Sketch Vitals and Other Information to Family Tree? There is a link to that article below.
If all of the children are listed under the second spouse, we would suggest you create an additional marriage relationship with an estimated marriage date of about one year before the birth of her first child. If you do not have the name of the first wife you can enter her as Mrs. (last name). The children born to her can be added to this relationship. Her death could be entered as the year her last child was born.
We hope this information helps as you endeavor to correct your Family Tree.
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Thank you. That is what I did, but I wonder how long it will take before the wrong information is gone. The site is showing people as related to me that are not.
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If you are confident there are unrelated people connected to your ancestors in Family Tree, you can make those corrections yourself. Here is a link to an article giving you instructions for correcting parent-child relationships.
You will not be deleting the unrelated records, just un-linking them from your family. It will be important to type reason statements so others will understand why you are making these corrections. Hopefully that will keep others from adding them again.
Best wishes as you correct the records of your ancestors.
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Thank you for your concern. It is not possible to prevent other people from making incorrect changes to your family because FamilySearch is a single world wide family tree. But, there are measures that can be taken to help prevent these changes. This is described in the following article:
One other tool that may be particularly useful is to follow a person. You will then be notified of any changes that are made to that person and you can deal with it immediately.
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This was a very helpful reply. Thank you. I will follow your suggestions. I hope the documentation that I left will show that I am correct. If I can, I will leave a copy of the marriage certificate to prove the marriage between the two people as I have on Ancestry and other sites.
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@Daulton Ruff , one more approach:
There are different kinds of parent-child links. Your focus is on the biological relationship but if the 2nd wife appears in census records with the children from the 1st wife, many contributors will want to make parent-child relationships for her. To do that, there is a step- parent/child type of relationship, giving each child 2 sets of parents. Then, from each child's page set the Preferred relationship to their biological parents. This will prevent confusion on family trees while also honoring the non-biological relationship.
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Thank you, and sorry for taking so much time to reply. I will look at the options for selecting relationships. At this moment I am unaware of how to do this but it is interesting.
I just reiterated that Henry B Berry, my Great grandfather did have a first wife and I put a note saying what children belonged to who.
I'll have to go back and take a look if any of the changes I made, made a difference. I had established those relationships a long time ago so it was frustrating to get a message saying that I was related to a family that I was not.
It looks like to me that family members as well as a lot of other people are going to be confused in the future.
Thank you for your reply and for your time.
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