Is there a way to stop other people from editing and/or adding to my information?
Some person I don't know added my mother and uncle to my information on August 19th and marked both of them deceased. My uncle at the time was LIVING. He passed away on the 28th or 29th and when I logged on to change the date I found duplicate entries including the entry that predated his death by TEN DAYS. It was very upsetting. I sent a letter to the person who is not related to me and made all these changes deleting relationships and people. It is a tradition in my family to name the babies after the deceased and he removed children from their parents. I have been working on this information for 40 years and know what I am talking about. Can you lock your tree so that people need to send you a message before messing with your research??
Answers
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How do I lock my family tree to keep someone else from adding names to it? I just received a name that is not a member of my family along with a string of his relatives that were joined with him. How can someone add to my family tree without my permission? How can I prevent this from happening? How do I remove these names?
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You appear not to have understood the open-edit format of Family Tree before you began participating. No, there is nothing you can do to stop anybody - from close relative to someone of no known relationship whatsoever - from adding names to the branch of the tree to which your ancestors and relatives are added. You do not have your own family tree here (even if it's been just you who has previously added all the details), so nobody needs any permission to amend your work.
If other users make errors, you have to correct these yourself, although you should try to contact them in order to query their additions / changes. Hopefully, they will be responsive and you can resolve any differences of opinion.
In view of the nature Family Tree, you should always keep your data backed-up in another program that cannot be edited by anybody else. Also, you can download your family tree to the Genealogies section of the FamilySearch website, where it cannot be edited, either.
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Generally when a large group of non-relatives are added it means that someone has made an incorrect relationship either a wrong couple or a wrong child to parent. Find the incorrect relationship and remove it by clicking the little pencil icon in the relationship box then remove.
General comment, we cannot "Lock" a tree. We do not have individual trees (other that your private Living area). There is only the one shared tree in FS Family Tree.
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I started a family tree some long time ago, and forgot about it. Now I get a notification that some unrelated person modified my tree, with unknown names. I did not know that could be done, but I see that FamilySearch must be the only company that allows such a thing. It is not right! and I disagree with this policy. How are you to know the accuracy of that added information without finding the sources and verifying them yourself, or communicating with that person?
Therefore, I will combat this by deleting everything with my name and relatives on here and never use FamilySearch again. No business for you, FamilySearch! 😯
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It is unfortunate that you did not check that Family Tree is an open-edit, community project before you went ahead. Nobody has their own tree and, if others have made inputs to the profiles you created for your relatives, you won't be able to delete "everything with my name and relatives on here". So regardless of whether you choose to visit here again, your relatives' profiles will remain.
I would stress I have no connection to FamilySearch but did my "homework" before getting involved with the Family Tree project, so there were no surprises for me when others started to make amendments to my work.
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To me having a format such as this is simply inviting people to make incorrect changes to individuals who have done the hard work themselves for their ancestors. One should not have to correct incorrect changes but be allowed to prevent them in the first place. Prevention is much easier than correcting the problem after the fact. Even though most of these changes are not malicious in intent, there is nothing to prevent them if they are. Expecting us to 'follow' these people and just wait for them to make mistakes with our families and close relatives is asking a lot. A lot of us have jobs and other things keeping us busy and shouldn't have to worry about keeping our information safe. And providing documentation is simply ignored by a lot of people who continue to make incorrect changes to our branch. You are correct that a lot of us (myself included) did not check to see if this was possible b/c we or I just assumed this kind of thing would be handled more responsibly. If I had known someone could change my own mother's information I never would have joined in the first place but as you imply...my bad. Since so many people are dissatisfied and are leaving this site I would think the administrators would attempt 'a fix' or solution to this problem.
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I keep many trees for my family and friends in Ancestry, but I also work in FamilySearch. I spend a lot of time heavily sourcing my ancestors and those of my family and relatives. I find that is the best way to keep down the incident of incorrect editing. I also have digitized and uploaded many photos, documents, letters and old newspaper clippings. Doing this for your ancestors will help keep down the incorrect information. I add sources and info to friends and acquaintances of my ancestors too. In addition to family, I work as a volunteer lineage researcher for a lineage society, and when I find new sources for their ancestors, I always make a point of updating their ancestors in FamilySearch as well. Yes, I am updating information on people I am not related to, and if I didn't I would be guilty of hiding information. FamilySearch is a great community tree, in my opinion, and is worth all the work you put into it. Yes, I have those ancestors who have incorrect sources and information, but they are lived long enough ago that this is to be expected. One ancestor in particular was born in the 1600s in Europe and died in the mid 1700s in Maryland. If people squabble over me 400 years from now like present day people are squabbling over him, I will be so pleased! I won't have been forgotten!
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To put the other point of view, the existence of a shared and collaborative tree was a marvellous discovery to me.
Many of the ancestors in our family records were already present in the Family Tree, and I can add additional sources, add further sourced people and their relationships, etc. Where there are clear errors (with the correct versions backed up by the sources), I am able to make the corrections direct. Not like Ancestry or myHeritage, where you can see egregious errors being copied from one tree to another with no capability of fixing anything.
The key is the sourcing, though, as @Gail Swihart Watson says - if you are comfortable that your sources hold water, there seems to me to be no reason at all not to revert contradictory changes by others that are not properly sourced.
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FamilySearch, FamilyTree is a “one world tree,” or a “unified database” that aims to contain one entry for each person recorded in genealogical records, therefore all FamilySearch users are able to add persons, link them to existing persons or merge duplicates. Family Tree is different from other similar genealogy sites in that it is a single, public tree linked together in families, rather than a site that only allows users to create and manage their own private trees. This distinction means that everyone works together on the same data, allowing for the potential to connect every member of the human family.
Family Tree compares records and sources in order to help you resolve mistakes or duplication in records. It also provides messaging and collaboration tools, as well as free expert phone support, to help you resolve errors. Family Tree draws from FamilySearch's enormous database to provide record hints. This makes it easier to link you and your ancestors to earlier generations.
See also https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/online-family-tree
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Many thanks @Tennuchi Alan Cyril Edward for this and for the interesting blog post link.
I was interested in this (my bold): 'the FamilySearch Family Tree enables all descendants to share information that others might not know and add sources to confirm correct information'.
Surely the key is that people should only ever 'share information' for which they are able to 'add sources to confirm correct information'? The Family Tree clearly doesn't in any way enforce this; I'm not sure how it could, without major volunteer policing of a formal governance framework, a la Wikipedia; but the lack of adequate sourcing is surely the root cause of many of the sorts of concerns discussed in this post.
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MandyShaw1 Yes, you are correct that people should ONLY share information for which they are able to source. However, 2 situations interfere with this. 1) There are a variety of experience levels operating in the FamilySearch world and many of people don't have a clue what the word "source" really means. They are enthusiastic and believe that any effort is helping. I think that might be the bigger problem. The smaller problem, 2) which takes up a whole lot of time for experienced users - is when the sources are ambiguous, contradictory or inadequate. There are all kinds of rules considered "standards of genealogy" which deal with these kinds of problems; however you will still find duplicate person records when there should be one, one person records when there should be multiple, wrong parents, yada yada, you name it. I am currently allowing 2 different family groups to fester with incorrect family attachments and wrong sources only because I myself haven't sorted it all out yet. A third family group I simply abandoned as a mess because I couldn't sort it out. (Of these 3, only one is my own ancestors and the other 2 are associated with my volunteer lineage research.).
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I now understand the "anything-goes-when-you're-not-paying-for-it" logic with copying data to and fro on Family Search. The unfortunate part of this practice is that the people with good intentions are "borrowing" false information that's randomly getting dropped into legitimate research and then taking it over to Ancestry so they can fill in their tree with the same bad data they trusted from a Family Search tree. I've managed to grow a 7th cousin on my mother's side and the user is trying to add more information to my father's side, and also adding pictures to Family Search, tagging the wrong people from Ancestry. Inserting my tree here was a mistake and now it's so screwed up that I can't understand or use it at all. Additionally, many folks are deep into the novelty and are really just doing trial runs through their trees. In doing so they might grab the first matched name they find and nail it down without substantiating any facts or citing sources. For these reasons, I no longer trust the information users are allowed to leave here. In general, I'm not excited about any of the databases anymore. They seem to grow hit and run genealogists and push the bell and whistle features. Ancestry is trying to tell me that I likely do not care for coffee. WHAT???
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