An Update on Understanding the Changes in the FamilySearch Family Tree

Genealogy is primarily a very personal activity. Recording the history of your family whether by oral history, diary, journal, or entries in a Bible or other family book is also a cultural activity. As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have also inherited a set of unique religious doctrines that provide some motivation for being involved in family history. But we often do not recognize that recording family history (genealogy) is a worldwide cultural activity that has operated throughout history. Members of the Church who have only heard about "genealogy" through the channel of the Church's doctrine and instruction are often surprised that people "outside" the Church are even aware of or interested in genealogy. The common thought process is "I am not interested in doing my genealogy despite the teachings of the Church so why would someone outside the Church be interested."

Even though the FamilySearch.org Family Tree has now been freely available as a family history tool, many members of the Church have yet to even open the website and look at their part of the Family Tree and a significant percentage of the Church membership has less than four generations of their family information on the website. However, there were approximately 70,000 people who crossed the Plains and are defined as "pioneers." The descendants of these pioneers constitute a sizable percentage of the present-day membership of the Church. Much of the accumulated genealogical information that ultimately seeded the FamilySearch.org Family Tree came from the pioneers' descendants.

This reservoir of information included a hodgepodge of family history with a lot of entry-level genealogy primarily passed down through families sprinkled with the work of a few dedicated genealogists. There was no standardization or review of this massive amount of data. In addition, by its very nature of the sources tapped for this reservoir, there was a huge amount of duplication. When this huge data set was finally incorporated in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, it contained a cross-section of all possible levels of genealogical expertise.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that all of the family history that was accumulated since pioneer times was included in the Family Tree, a lot of duplicate and poorly researched family history still resides in the paper and old Personal Ancestral Files that are still circulating out there among those descendants of the pioneers. When one of the recipients of this information decides to look at the Family Tree, they immediately see differences between what they have received from their traditional, hand-me-down, genealogy and what is now been put into the Family Tree. Without knowing anything at all about genealogical research, adding sources or anything else useful, they dive right in and start adding and changing what has been done now for years.

Those of us, like me, who have every family line traced back to pioneers already have a massive cleanup project and that cleanup is complicated by the flow of information from the preexistent reservoir from years past.

How you view family history or genealogy determines the extent of your involvement. Genealogy can be viewed as a casual pastime or hobby or it can be viewed as a complex activity requiring several professional-level skills. It is true that "everyone" can become involved in family history. Everyone can learn about their ancestors' lives and come to appreciate their ancestral heritage. But relatively few people work to acquire those professional-level skills inevitably necessary for more than casual interest.

In the past, those individuals with a casual interest in genealogy and those who acquired the necessary skills to do more intensive research lived in completely different worlds. However, even highly skilled researchers did not always document their sources or provide consistent entries. Much of the professional level effort was directed at compiling articles and books about particular family lines for publication and perhaps hundreds of thousands or even more of these books have been published. For example, I probably spent the first twenty years researching my family before I had any serious interaction with a professional-level genealogical researcher. I do remember meeting one at the Salt Lake City, Utah Family History Library but that was only a casual meeting and it was the first time I had ever heard of anyone being a professional genealogist.

I think the situation is pretty much the same today. The main difference is that today we have the internet and genealogy has moved from a very personal and even private persuasion to being a very public and popular activity. Although most of the people who are interested enough in genealogy to order a DNA test or start a small online family tree still have never met or worked with a professional-level genealogist, they are now thrown together in close virtual proximity online.

The basic structure of the Family Tree is a wiki and that means changes will happen. Presently, I am trying to determine whether or not the idea that a wiki structured database format for the Family Tree will ultimately end up with an accurate end product. Over time, that should be the case but with the overburden of pre-existing pioneer information always out there and being passed on from generation to generation, it seems like the task of cleaning up the entries is going to require some non-wiki restrictions to keep the bad information from continually recycling.

It is evident that the Family Tree is becoming more stable in parts, but there are areas where the changes are so prevalent that there is no control of the information even when well-researched, documented information is easily obtainable such as with descendants of the Mayflower and other such areas with a huge amount of activity from the reservoir of traditionally obtained information.

Meanwhile, those of us with large segments of ancestral information in the Family Tree will just need to become accustomed to "correcting" the changes. I assumed that this process would slow down over time, but now, after years of working on the Family Tree, I see the same or higher levels of changes over and over again as new unsophisticated users are attracted and who have inherited their "information" from their pioneer families.

There are some new tools arriving on the scene, such as the ability to synchronize a complete family tree from MyHeritage.com that give me a glimmer of hope, but for now, I will just keep plugging away at pushing back on the changes.