Volunteer Project

MLV2

Does anyone know what or who this "Volunteer Project" is? They seem to be engaged in wholesale importing of unverified and incorrect data from other websites, overwriting sources, and leaving only "GEDCOM Data" under reason information is correct. There is no way to send a message to them.

Michael

N Tychonievich

@MLV2 Can you clarify what "Volunteer Project" you are referring to? Where exactly do you see it referenced? A URL that we can go to and see what you are seeing would be really helpful.

Gordon Collett

If you see GEDCOM Data as a reason statement, that means that the basic information was uploaded by a user into the Genealogies section then transferred via the compare process there into Family Tree. Any "wholesale importing of unverified and incorrect data from other websites, overwriting sources" was done by the person importing the data or by other users at some point after that import. "Volunteer Project" has nothing to do with any of that.

The only time you will see "Volunteer Project" is when the original data for place names did not have any linked standard. The only thing the volunteer project does is to link a standard to those place names that did not have one without changing the displayed data at all.

This is "Volunteer Project": https://www.familysearch.org/tree/improve-place-names/

You can get to it from your home page when signed in:

Carole McIntyre

@MLV2

If you are seeing incorrect information (i.e. place names), it could come from the volunteer project to standardize place names. I have noticed that sometimes the place chosen or standardized will be wildly different, like Afghanistan for Norwegian records. This can occur when the person standardizing is unfamiliar with the place names and accepts a prompt without stopping to do a little research first.

The Gedcom note would indicate that the file came from patrons who uploaded their trees to the system, as Gordon Collett pointed out, and may not have standardized the place names at all, sometimes having severely abbreviated place names as well. The automated suggestions in the volunteer project is not equipped to handle those and would need special care by the volunteer. If volunteering in this project, it would be wise, instead of jus accepting the prompt, to take note of the ID # of the person and look it up in FamilyTree to see where they really lived.

The standardizing effort is somewhat hampered by the patrons wishing to note the farm on which a person was born, rather than the parish, and therefore listing the farm name in the birth place field. The farm name could be added to the notes or other information instead and that would solve the problem going forward.

Farm names in Scandinavia are not normally in the standardizing list unless added to it by individuals. Many patrons have strong feelings about the farm name identification, even adding them as last names, although that is not how the census or other church records usually have identified them during the patronymic timeframe. I hasten to point out that there are exceptions to this in some parish records.

This hampers the automated search results in most cases, which first searches by name.

Of course there are those who actually took the farm name as their last name, but that was mostly after the patronymic period. They can be identified by that name in the census records.

In comparison, I believe that Welsh homes, especially farms, also had individual place names, but the same problem has not occurred there, even though Welsh names are just as common. There may be other countries that have the same tradition of naming a house or farm.

If I understand correctly, the standardizing effort is aimed at improving the search engine in finding people. Therefore, the more we are willing to cooperate with the effort, the better the search results will become and will assist patrons in finding their ancestors. It only takes a couple of seconds to check other information when we evaluate the ancestor and his/her sources and is recommended practice before proceeding with further research anyway.

I hope this helps.

MLV2

Thanks to Gordon Collett and Carol McIntyre for clarifying that "Volunteer Project" only refers to changes for location, and the original change (with GEDCOM DATA inserted as reason something is correct) apparently was the result of some user uploading without checking and verifying. I have participated in the place name improvement effort, but did not realize improved names are attributed to Volunteer Project.

The real issue is the ability to upload GEDCOM files without following the suggestions outlined by FamilySearch. Although FS specifically states that notes and sources are not transferred and outlines several steps that should be taken for accuracy, this often is ignored and users simply upload without following the recommendations. The result is "GEDCOM Data" is inserted as the reason why something is correct - overwriting anything that might have been there, duplicates are created, incorrect information clogs the tree, etc.

An example is found in three changes for L2LN-13N, where three changes are attributed to Volunteer Project, with GEDCOM data as the reason for being correct. Since these three changes deal with location, the helpful explanations of Gordon and Carol indicate that "GEDCOM Data" was already inserted as the reason it was correct, and not Volunteer Project.

Michael

Gordon Collett

Sorry to deviate from the topic of discussion here, but I am one of the "Many patrons [who] have strong feelings about the farm name identification."

Having the farm name in the birthplace is absolutely critical in avoiding incorrect merges for Scandinavians.

"The standardizing effort is somewhat hampered by the patrons wishing to note the farm on which a person was born, rather than the parish, and therefore listing the farm name in the birth place field."

But is is not a question of either - or it is perfectly acceptable and actually best practice to put both the farm and the parish.

Here is my full, completely unofficial, presentation on what I view to be the best way to enter Norwegian place names in Family Tree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veP6UcEkHaA

Things are gradually improving in the Places database for Norway. As far as I can tell, about a third of the municipalities in Hordaland, where I do 95% of my Family Tree work, have had every major farm entered as Farm, Parish (prestegjeld, not sogn)/Municipality, County, Country to the list of standardized places. I don't know how things are going in the rest of the country.

On an additional side note, for western Norway, particularly Hordaland, where the farm name was used as a surname at least as early as the late 1700s, my practice is to enter a person's full name under vitals and the shorter patronymic form of their name as an alternate name. Since all search routines look at all names, the vitals name and all the alternate names, including the surname/farm name does not hamper the search engine at all. Also, having that surname right there where everyone can see it is a tremendous help in preventing incorrect merges.

Gordon Collett

Back to the topic at hand:

One very important feature to be familiar with in Family Tree is the Change Log. It is extremely valuable when it comes to figuring out what is going on with a record. To take your example, going to the Change Log by going to the right hand column, the section labeled Latest Changes, and clicking Show All you can see each individual change to the record since its creation. You can filter by the various data items to make it easier to view. Here are the three changes made by the Volunteer Project:

Look carefully at this. Nothing in the data was actually changed. This is one of the two quirks in the Change Log that I am aware of. If a standard is linked to a place name or if the standard is changed, you will see in the Change Log that a change was made but there will be no visible change.

Prior to this "change", if you had opened the editing box for the birth, you would have seen:

After the Volunteer Project standardized the data, the editing box then would have looked like this:

While I'm here, I'll get back on my soapbox to declare that this is the only thing that Family Tree means by standardization, that the editing box looks like the second view, not the first. The program, the FamilySearch programmers, and the FamiySearch data people do not care in the least what the place name looks like in the first data field as long as it is correctly linked to a suitable standard which is then seen in the second field. The two lines do not need to, and often cannot, look the same. This standardization model, which is very misunderstood by a lot of people, is what allows you to add just as much information as needed to a place name to correctly and fully identify someone, such as a street address or a farm name, without confusing the program. (I'm stepping down again.)

The other quirk in the Change Log is that if a change in any way involves a living person, such as attaching a living child to a deceased couple, that edit does not appear in the Change Logs for the parents.

KathyMiller1

There is a BYU volunteer project doing 1910 census adds that also uses the name Volunteer project.