Using MyHeritage to correct entries in the FamilySearch Family Tree

Several technologies have come together to provide a major increase in the ability to find errors in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. One of the most significant of those technologies comes from the MyHertitage.com website's Consistency Checker. First of all, MyHeritage.com and FamilySearch.org have been cooperating in order to allow MyHeritage.com to import up to eight generations of your part of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree into a new family tree on MyHeritage.com. This feature was introduced in Beta and called FamilySearch Tree Sync back in March of 2018. It has now been released to a relatively small group of users. The program is only available to those people who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

https://blog.myheritage.com/2018/03/new-familysearch-tree-sync-beta-allows-familysearch-users-to-synchronize-their-family-trees-with-myheritage/

There was a limited distribution of the code to use the FamilySearch Tree Sync at RootsTech 2019.

I have been using the program for some time and one "benefit" has been to see how many errors there are in my eight generations imported from FamilySearch into my family tree on MyHeritage.com.  The results from using the Consistency Checker (shown above) are a little discouraging. You can see that I have 747 Consistency issues found. This is a graphic example of the work left to do on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.

You do not need to synchronize your file to have your family tree on MyHeritage. You can run the Consistency Checker any time but the advantage of synchronization is that it reduces the number of steps you need to take to correct the errors. The key is to use the error information from MyHeritage to find the same people in the FamilySearch Family Tree and make the corrections in both trees.

Here is an example from the Consistency Checker.

When I click on this entry, I can see his detail page on MyHeritage.

The arrow points to the link between the two programs. Yes, the dates on the entry are suspect. One advantage is that I can now see this person in both programs and use the resources for each program to make the correction. 

The challenge here is that there are about 500+ entries on the FamilySearch.org website for people named John Stewart in the time period indicated. There are also no sources showing a death date. On the MyHeritage website, it looks like there are quite a number of other family trees that have the same person with the same unsupported death date. However, on MyHeritage, the results of searching for this person show that the 1857 date probably belongs to a John Stewart who died in Ohio. 

After an extended search, for now, the solution is to remove the unsupported and unsourced date of death. That still leaves the entry with sources for a birth but a death date will have to wait for more research. 

By using the two programs, you have a much greater chance of making a correction to both records.