I have recently received several comments from people who state that they will not use the Family Tree because of the "changes." In an attempt to provide yet another answer to these complaints, I have been thinking about the core reasons why the Family Tree exists and should be a choice for storing all of your genealogical data. I believe the most important of the reasons I came up with is the need to avoid duplication of effort.
If you were to spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years doing research about your ancestors, how would you like to find out that someone had already done all that same research that included a source citation for every single person, event, and place recorded? That is not a hypothetical situation. It has been the reality for genealogical research for more than a hundred years. By refusing to use the Family Tree, you are, in effect, putting your research in danger of being nothing more than a duplication of work that may have been done previously. Changes to your data on the Family Tree is a really small price to pay for avoiding duplication of effort.
This is a great argument to have your own Family History database on your own computer. It makes it a lot easier to replace your work when someone takes it down.
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