Grouping everyone with an unknown father under one "unknown" person
I'm wondering if this is considered to be an acceptable way of grouping people (it seems strange to me): someone researching Borzecin (Poland) is gathering up everyone with the same surname (for example Pudelko) whose father is unknown, and putting them under one "unknown Pudelko" man as his children. This one (GKPG-163) has 51 so-called children, with birth years spanning about 100 years. Wouldn't this mess up how the FamilySearch algorithm works in giving hints? I'm considering unlinking these 51 people, but I don't want to interfere with a system that might be the newest thing. What do you think?
Best Answer
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As this situation proved, this kind of thing is considered abuse by the FamilySearch team. As a person created specifically to be a combination of multiple people, it meets the criteria of being an intentional fake person.
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Answers
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I have seen other make references to this kind of thing. I presume that the person who created the situation you are describing was not aware they can create floating persons not connected to the tree when they find a lone source which proves someone existed but proves very little else. Personally, I would not disconnect those "children" as the person is using it as a "to do" list of some sort.
However, if the consensus is to disconnect them all, I would message the person first and let them know it is ok to have floater person records. Also tell them if they REALLY want to track the group of floaters from within FamilySearch, let him know he can view a list of such people records in a variety of ways: using notes on his own person record, or using the Other Relationship function to connect those people to his own person record. There might even be better ideas from others.
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I have very mixed feelings about these One Name Studies that some people carry out in the manner you describe. They are apparently using such a grouping so they can easily find the people again by keeping track of the single "Unknown Father."
But yes, it could mess up the hinting algorithm for those people. It also clutters their change log. Then there is the potential for getting non-siblings convincingly linked together long term.
The first thing I would take a look at is the activity of whoever is doing this. Did he make change yesterday? Or have these not been touched for ten years? If this is an active project (and I see changes made Oct 2023 so it appears to still be active) and all of these will be unlinked from that "father" within a few months, I'd leave it alone and hope for the best. If the person has given up on finding out who any of these children are and abandoned this non-family then that is another matter.
If one of these is a direct ancestor of yours and you are working on a brick wall situation, and you know that the person is not a sibling of any of the other fifty I would feel free to remove just your ancestor. Or contact the person behind this and get involved in the project of finding your ancestor's uncles, aunts, and cousins.
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This situation is reminiscent of another one we discussed a few months ago. Borderline abuse, in my opinion. https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/531398#Comment_531398
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I'd certainly prefer that people kept all those "children" as separate individual linked only to known, real family. It's pretty simple to keep a personal spreadsheet of all of them with one entry in the line for a person being a live link to their Family Tree page.
Such a spreadsheet has a lot of advantages for research, primarily the ability to sort in various ways.
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@Gordon Collett If you look at the unknown person mentioned, and all the 50-odd children, it is clear this is a project to create families based on a set of Polish church registers from the 1500s - 1700s. It's not very easy to make this magnitude of effort and link everyone to "known, real family". Doing this kind of project is golden for the larger FamilySearch community, it's just what should be the strategy when you are "in progress".
I actually applaud the effort, and quite frankly, I'm not sure what is the best way to organize one's efforts plodding through a mass of images to create the family groups mentioned in every line of every page.
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@BraydenGraves What is done here is not abuse. It is a wonderful thing that is organized poorly. The fact that all those family groups were created is amazing. The fact that all the male heads of the house are connected via one fake record is possibly a bad decision but you cannot possibly consider such an amazing contribution to the world tree as this abuse. Abuse is the family tree of Mickey Mouse. That is making a mockery of the world tree. This person is genuinely helping the world tree to grow.
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@Gail Swihart Watson I'm just sharing what FamilySearch's response was last time. The profile was deleted, and the person who created it received a warning.
And, as other people have brought up, this could potentially stop the algorithm from helping to find the real parents, which is a clear negative.
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@BraydenGraves So all the "children" are now floaters?
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@Gail Swihart Watson For all we know, they could all be duplicates that just aren't being detected because of the false father. And as @Gordon Collett mentioned, you could use a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them for future reference, which wouldn't interfere with the tree itself.
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" ... putting them under one "unknown Pudelko" man ..."
So the name for GKPG-163 appears to be (currently) "Unknown Father Borzęcin Pudelek Pudelko" - in English.
What happens if someone comes along who can speak Polish but not English? Can they interpret that name as intended, or will they assume that is a genuine name in some language or other?
The example I always use is the person who knows that they have German ancestry and, based on FamilySearch, they (think they) know that their 3G-GM was "Frau Unbekannt". Curiously they can't find any records for the "Unbekannt" family... This is the classic problem where words are used in place of names.
There is another, subtler issue with that particular name. I could, if I wasn't thinking it through, assume that "Unknown Father Borzęcin Pudelek Pudelko" was a Polish priest known as "Father Borzęcin Pudelek Pudelko", though the researcher appears unclear which Catholic priest fathered so many children... Wonder why?
Sorry - seriously bad idea for all the reasons stated above, and the scope for miscommunication to the non-polyglots among us.
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@Gail Swihart Watson stated: Doing this kind of project is golden for the larger FamilySearch community, it's just what should be the strategy when you are "in progress".
I actually applaud the effort, and quite frankly, I'm not sure what is the best way to organize one's efforts plodding through a mass of images to create the family groups mentioned in every line of every page.
That is why I have such mixed feelings about such projects being managed in Family Tree. At least this user does try to be clear about what is going on:
To help sorting use this Father for any Pudełek/Pudełko (Polish/Church Latin) or Pudełkowna/Pudełkanka (unwed feminine) in Borzęcin, Brzesko, Poland (Austria) with unknown parents. There are no records from Borzęcin before 1780s found online. Lowest listed children could be added to the older children by house number proximity until left with the eldest. There are records from neighboring towns with the family name and before 1780. Some records appear as Poland with no exact location.
But a notice like this should be on every person listed. And there should be an Alert Note on every single person along the lines of "There is absolutely no evidence of any relationship between any of these people besides the coincidence of having the same last name. Some were living in the same house when they died but that does not mean they were siblings or cousins or even related."
Basically this is just creating an index of an index and adding a temporary, unfounded, link between the people in the index.
So, yes, while this is a great effort to sort out who these people are and a valiant attempt to determine if any of them are related to each other, I think there are far better ways to do this than to group them as a "family" in Family Tree.
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@Gordon Collett First, I think you misunderstood what I meant by "family". I randomly looked at a handful of the 50 odd "children" and every one I looked at had a spouse and children - a reasonable number of children, like 5. Each "child" head of house had 2-3 sources, so those "children generations" is what I meant by family. One could reasonably assume at that level these are real people and not made up.
Second, I definitely bump into sources naming people who are not yet on the tree. (I also personally have documents I've inherited which name lots of non-family business associates or family friends.) Happily, most of the time the information also contains parents, children or spouses who ARE on the tree, so it is an easy job of creating a new person in the proper place. However, sometimes they are listed in a vacuum, and when I search for them in a census, I might indeed find them (often with a family!) but sometimes there is still not enough info for me to figure out their place in the tree. This can also be a problem if dealing with an extremely common name and the problem morphs into which of several places in the tree does this person belong. When I can't place a person or family group on the tree - for either reason - I just leave them out of the tree. So far I am keeping a spreadsheet of my unknowns, which helps no one but me. So far I have not created any floaters.
This is going to continue as I am finding conundrums in my volunteer work as a lineage researcher. For a specific project I'm working on, I need to do surname research for 2 surnames within a specific location and timeframe and I've already begun wondering how am I going to keep my findings organized. Every person in the game will be source based, but I will not necessarily know parent-child relationships. With one surname I already have around 10-15 people, each of whom need to be individually researched and linked to each other, if possible. I'm planning to put everyone in a spreadsheet, and when I can place them on the world tree, I will, but I'm curious.
Is there a way you recommend putting ALL this info in the tree so others may find it? If I create floaters for the people I can't place, I can definitely track their PIDs in my spreadsheet, I guess that could work for me. But is that approach recommended? Is it of any value? What is the recommended way to handle this?
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So, a quick clarification on what I said yesterday, the situation a few months ago was somewhat different, and I've realized there is a chance that FamilySearch would make a different call here than they did then. I still don't believe that what was found here was good practice, and I still believe that it violates the rule against fake people, but I'm no longer as certain that FamilySearch will care, as it has less potential for interference than the other example.
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@Gail Swihart Watson , I don't think anyone would have any concerns about creating small, accurate family groups, properly sourced, in Family Tree while working through a set of records. It's only the grouping of everyone without a parent into one huge "family" group and making all those 51 potential relatives or strangers look like siblings and the creation of an imaginary "father" for all of them that really bothers everyone concerned about this.
I think I would be happy if people who feel this is valuable:
- Would make it extremely and painfully clear with as many redundant statements as needed exactly what they are doing.
- Do not create any suggestion of sibling relationships where there are none.
Thinking through this, I would propose that instead of using the Family Members section to collect random people with the same last name, that the Other Relationships section could be used. That would keep these end-of-line individuals easily accessible but not imply anything about how these people who share only a last name might be related.
Here is an example I created in beta:
I wouldn't think that any of the hinting or other routines look at Other Relationships since this section can be used for completely unrelated people.
If this seems reasonable, how do we convince people to use this method instead? Would it be appropriate for whoever stumbles across one of these one name studies to reconfigure the linking page?
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@Gordon Collett asked -
" ... If this seems reasonable, how do we convince people to use this method instead? Would it be appropriate for whoever stumbles across one of these one name studies to reconfigure the linking page?"
I think we can be fairly certain that the possible responses will include:
- "Who do you think you are? I've submitted a million profiles every week since 1776!" (OK, a slight degree of exaggeration there);
- Complete (but sensible) disagreement with the reconfiguring;
- Complete confusion;
- Disgruntlement at "their" data being changed;
- Cautious agreement;
That being so, I think that unless FamilySearch gets behind the idea, then it wouldn't be a good idea to unilaterally reconfigure such a page.
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This has been addressed by private message.
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