Is it possible to prevent others to mess up your family tree?
I have an issue that has now happened twice, or at least two separate instances that I discovered this past week...
So imagine my shock when I log into my account, and see that my father, Whom I had just spoken to, is dead... of course I'm upset at this and go to investigate. Turns out, according to this new duplicate info, that the spelling on my Father's surname is wrong, AND so was birth records. I contacted the person who made the entry, who then inferred that THEIR info must be correct, as they are very careful. Eventually I detached this imposter profile from my grandfather's name and wrote a nice love letter in the comments section.
On the same day, I get a message from a person looking for more info on family on my mother's side, which I was glad to help with. but in the process, I discovered that yet another person had created duplicates of my info...
I don't want to keep spending time cleaning up messes OTHER PEOPLE CAUSE ON MY TREE...
Is it possible to lock my tree, forcing others to request merging info?
Answers
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First, you do not have a tree. There is one world tree and everyone should be cooperating to continually update it. Please stop using the term "my tree". Secondly, to be honest, it sounds to me that you may be mistaken about your father. If this record has a different spelling and has sources to back up different information, it may be that this is not your father, but a different man. If you post the PID number, other users here will very likely look into it for you. Also post the PID of the other record on your mother's side.
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@DominiqueThom1 First in answer to your question - NO - it is not possible to prevent others.
Your first sentence second paragraph says father. Last sentence second paragraph says grandfather. Which one had the problem it - or are you saying both are currently living and have had the same issue? It seems your father is not deceased but your grandfather may be? If you could provide PIDs (person IDs) - someone/FamilySearch can investigate. See below for my recommendation that you contact FamilySearch support.
If someone marked your living father as deceased my understanding is that this would have no effect on the Living profile you have representing him. Since you state this is not the case - and that your representation is also now deceased I recommend contacting FamilySearch support to investigate the Latest Changes for your living profile or the process that merged your living profile into the deceased one. As I cannot browse FamilySearch.org due to error 15 - something has 1.changed on FamilySearch end in regard either to 1. my account 2. Or their security servers OR 1. Google chrome mobile updates though I have made no setting changes have introduced an incompatibility appearing as a security breach. 2. Some sophisticated hacker has introduced a DDOS targeting FamilySearch - either onto my mobile phone or onto FamilySearch servers ... OR some other possibility. In any event this impedes me sharing with you the FamilySearch support contact information which you will find in the circle with question mark icon - upper right area of FamilySearch.org> Contact Us.
(If anything is certain - you certainly have a tree. Your father is most certainly in your tree - you may continue using the term 'my tree'. It really isn't complicated. But yes - as Gail mentions the FamilySearch Family Tree is shared.) I agree - cleaning up others messes on near-relations profiles is very frustrating and really unnecessary - but No, currently it is not possible to lock any profiles - the shared open-edit model of the Family Tree allows anyone to make changes and/or messes of any deceased profile.
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Yes, well, My family tree is something we are proud of, and when people come and screw around with it, it frustrates me. To be honest, I'm not in this to be an insignificant speck on a tree with 8 Billion branches. I'm only interested in my bloodline relatives and not the extended branches that have no bearing on my lineage.
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@DominiqueThom1 , it appears @genthusiast is interested in helping you sort this out. Please provide him the PIDs. As for you not wanting "to be an insignificant speck on a tree with 8 Billion branches", you need to think about whether you want to be working in FamilySearch. That is what we all are who work on ancestors belonging to ourselves, our in-laws, our adopted relatives, in-laws of adopted relatives and our friends. And once you go back to your 4th or 5th grandparents, you share your bloodline with hundreds (or more) of other people. I have met 3rd, 4th and 5th cousins here in FamilySearch and have worked with them, exchanged information and kept in touch on Facebook.
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@Gail Swihart Watson does my referring Dominique to FamilySearch support or the fact that I cannot browse FamilySearch.org due to error 15 sound like I am interested to sort out the issue? It appears I was typing on my phone as you entered your response - I did not see your response until after I posted mine. If you are interested to investigate - by all means once any PIDs are posted anyone can ... as I said ..
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@genthusiast So sorry!!! Yes, I assumed incorrectly you were jumping in. Apologies!
I think someone will offer to help you, @DominiqueThom1 . Please post the PID when you can.
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@genthusiast, @Gail Swihart Watson There is nothing to sort, as I said, I removed the incorrect info that presented to be that of my father who is still very much alive. so the incorrect duplicate info no longer appears on my "tree" FS did not change his status, so everything is as it should be.
it is a pity that FS is opensource, which other platforms would you recommend that has a greater control?
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DominiqueThom1 I use Ancestry in addition to FamilySearch. I maintain information in both places. If you don't want to maintain your ancestors in FamilySearch, you should still consider using their CONSIDERABLE amount of resources for research. I attached quite a few FamilySearch sources to my Ancestry trees. Ancestry gives you absolute control over your tree, including whether or not anyone can even see that it exists. You can do there what you currently cannot here. You can invite close and trusted relatives or friends to see and contribute to your tree, including all the living persons. If you choose to take a DNA test there, you can attach it to your tree and Ancestry has a number of tools to let you compare your tree to those of confirmed relatives. It is not necessary to do a DNA test, however, and there are still tricks I use in Ancestry, when researching ancestors of friends without a DNA test, to compare different trees and sources on those trees. Ancestry itself, like FamilySearch, has a staggering number of sources for your research. I am kind of a Virginia expert, and there are millions of records in Ancestry which have not yet made it into FamilySearch. Good luck and happy hunting!
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@DominiqueThom1 @Gail Swihart Watson @PABulfinch I use these platforms Family search,Ancestry,find my past, my heritage and FamilytreeDNA. As for blood linage I have about 8400 connections with the combinations of my Y-DNA, mt-DNA, and Autosomal DNA on FamilytreeDNA.I usually do not touch the descendent records on family search because of my lack of experience with that line. My family has been recording our family tree for 200 years. Me and my father have agreed that everyone should have a private tree since we started working on Family search since the 1990's. Family search was built so we could share are knowledge of family history to the world and bless the world. At the time my father used roots magic and I used ancestry quest. I believe that family search offers these platforms for free to the members of the church( Ancestry, Find my past, my Heritage, roots magic, Ancestry quest). I do not know if these services are offered free to non members. I am currently working on the common patronymic names in Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the 1700- 1800's. This requires me also to use GPT Chat 4 for the research. So I utilize open and closed sources for my research and to record my family history. Both have their pros and cons. But it is really up to you how involved you want to be. I am only writing this because I was impress to look at this comment.
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@DominiqueThom1, if you like some aspects of the collaborative model, you can try WikiTree. It has profile managers and trusted lists that offer some degree of control over your contributions. (Unfortunately the interface has a learning curve and an unconscious Anglo-centric bias.)
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AaronArthurDavis Anyone in the world can create an account and work on their family history for free. Any researcher who works either as a volunteer or a paid genealogist also has access to the world tree and all sources free of charge. I have to go to a FamilySearch Center to see some records, but that is still free of charge except for the gas it takes to drive there. They let me email the records to myself, so there is no printing cost.
Apparently there is an issue with creating people born in certain parts of the world, but that does not affect me.
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Sorry, sometimes I forget things get lost in translation.... The duplicate was of my father, and was listed as a child of my grandfather. So by detaching it from my grandfather, it has now disappeared from our tree.
My father's profile that I created shows he is still living. so all is set there
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Something was said that puzzles me. A living father was marked dead, by someone other than the profile-creator.
I thought a living person is flagged as private and that could only the creator (or FS staff) can see their profile or alter their status.
Is this no longer the case?
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@No one in particular, policy is the same, no one can see your Living. Likely the other person created their own version of the profile in question ie a duplicate and marked that duplicate as Deceased.
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What Chas said. The person who created the erroneously-deceased profile couldn't see Dominique's version at all; that user could only see the one profile with that name under the parents he'd attached it to. It was only Dominique who came to the tree one day to find an extra copy of her father, marked deceased.
I, too, would find it highly disturbing to see an extra version of a still-living parent attached to my grandparents, and I would possibly take it as a sign to go work on WikiTree instead for a while, where I can set my grandparents to "only editable by the trusted list", even though they're all deceased (three of them before my parents met).
(But huh, I couldn't do the same for my spouse, because his paternal grandfather was born in 1866, and WT's rule is that all profiles with birthdates over 150 years ago must be set to "open". I guess they didn't think of long generations when they came up with that number.)
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That's helpful. I have a followup question.
Say I create someone and erroneously mark them deceased. Later, a direct family member discovers my error and corrects the profile to living. The profile is now private.
Who is then able to view the profile, me or the corrector?
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This has happened to me, although I am not a “direct” family member. The man who was marked deceased was a birth uncle of an adopted relative of mine. I am doing her birth family history. I had spoken to the birth mother about her family that day and she told me her brother was still alive.
what happened next was interesting. I had added one source to him prior to the phone call, but as a deceased record he had many sources. When I marked him still alive, first his record vanished. Then later I saw he had “come back” as living, but had only the source I had added.
The source was appropriate either way; it was an obit he was mentioned in.
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There can be complications, but generally, the corrected-status profile ends up in the private space of the person who created it, i.e. it becomes invisible to the corrector.
I encounter the situation fairly regularly as the corrector, because every year or so, some helpful soul comes along and adds the Famous Relative's still-living spouses to the tree. So then I do the obligatory web search, find a relatively-recent mention of their still-living status, and send an internal message. If I'm being properly patient, I wait at least a day before also going through the edit/report process. On the most recent iteration (a few months ago), I also added a note with the links I'd found. I'd already put notes about "they're still living" the previous times, which of course the other contributor failed to read, but that was before the old details page was phased out; I'm hoping the new layout will help delay the next iteration.
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@No one in particular Here's a copy of the form letter FS sends to let you know they have revised the status to living. You can see I'm informed that I will no longer be able to see the profile. Fine by me, since I don't enter the living in the FSFT.
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Since Family Search became partners with other paid sites, my tree (which was proven with DNA and documented on site research and sources) going back to 1520 completely fell apart. People see Ancestry hints and link them. They do not realize that genealogy moves at slower than sloth-speed and one link or addition to a family could have taken hours, days, months or years to establish with documentation. I found myself spending more time cleaning up other people's messes than doing actual research so stopped merging dupes, cleaning up links and ensuring family group records are accurate. My name has a Soundex with 38 different spellings, so now I keep my research on my local drive and have a bit of a chuckle when I see a son married to his mother. In my opinion, the linking of Family Search to the other paid "genealogy" websites was NOT value added now you have to sift through a lot of chaff to find any wheat.
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@r.j.bare, what "linking of Family Search to the other ... websites"??
The closest I can get is the links to WikiTree profiles that you can add as sources in FS's Family Tree, and that's not a paid site, and it's not much of a link.
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@r.j.bare I think what @Julia Szent-Györgyi is alluding to is a linking of user accounts, not a linking of sources or data. However, Ancestry is fairly saturated with wrongly assembled family lines and those relationships are routinely cut and pasted to here.
That said, I'm seeing Ancestry ease up somewhat on bad hints. Ancestry still offers hints (in the profile) based on bad trees but there are fewer algorithmically generated bad hints now. It may well slow the production of new bad trees.
To clarify, Ancestry is not yet like FamilySearch, where FS's hints often refuse to appear until after they're needed (eg: after the related details are entered - or not even then). But Ancestry does seems to be making careful steps in that direction.
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