Some Surprises in Descendancy Research

Red Icons? One of the fairly recent additions to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is the addition of a considerable number of red warning icons. These icons are now telling users that their entries lack standardized dates and places. Here is an example from the screenshot above.

Why has standardization now become an issue along with children born after the mother has died and other serious errors?

From my perspective, the lack of accurately located places in the Family Tree is one of the biggest challenges to the consistent accuracy of the entire database. One of most errors I encounter is that of children in one family born in various and sundry places that turn out to be from separate families. I certainly realize that standardizing an erroneous location does not resolve the error, but it may help to see that a family in England did not likely have a child born in California. In addition to helping the program locate the places on a map, standardization also helps organize the various jurisdictions in their proper order from the smallest to the largest.

I often depend on standardization as an indicator of the degree of involvement by capable users of the program. If I see a lot of non-standard dates and place names, I assume that no knowledgeable person has yet worked on that particular part of the Family Tree. There are other indicators of lack of involvement such as a long list of "Birth Names," but non-standard entries are a more reliable indicator.

Lack of involvement by other users often additionally indicates that there are opportunities to find additional individuals to add to the Family Tree. Other indicators include a lack of sources and incomplete names or names containing extraneous characters such as parentheses. In fact, the bigger the problem, the greater the opportunity.

If you understand the import of the red icons, you will realize that they are really opportunity indicators.