The 5 Most Common Mistakes made while working on the FamilySearch Family Tree

We all make misteakes. Oops. We all make mistakes. For genealogists, the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is an excellent example of what can happen when mistakes are abundantly made by the contributors both historical and current and I am certainly not excluding myself. For some time now, FamilySearch has provided a system of error notification using icons with red exclamation points. But there are a lot of errors that are not identified by the FamilySearch program. In this post, I have selected what I think are the five most common errors and explained why they are so common and what we all need to do to correct them.

The advantage of the Family Tree is that anyone can correct an error and hopefully do the correction without creating yet another error. My immediate family and I spend a lot of time correcting errors whether or not the errors have been identified by FamilySearch. Errors in a collaborative family tree are like weeds in a garden. Inevitable and simply part of the process of maintaining a vibrantly live family tree.

Here we go with my opinion of the five most common errors. First, some qualifications. Omissions due to lack of information are not errors. Failure to provide a standardized date or place name is not an error. It is necessary to standardize but the fact that someone has the right location or date but fails to put it in a standardized format is not an error. You cannot create a historical error by mandating a standard format or response. That issue has to do with programming and search engines, not history. Estimates are also not errors. Entering "about 1840" informs others that the exact date is unknown but is not an error.

There are other similar issues that are also not errors. So what are the errors?

1. Adding the wrong child, wife, or husband to a family.

This is error or type of error is extremely common in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. It is usually the result of focusing solely on names and dates and ignoring the locations. Granted, this error is more common in countries with a lot of similar given names and surnames, but it is particularly irksome when someone adds a child or a spouse without a source record supporting the added person. For example, people kept adding children born in England to my Tanner family in Arizona back in the early 1900s when travel would have made such an event nearly impossible and a long list of U.S. Census records did not show any children born in England.

2. Failing to check that an event location actually existed at the time of the event.

Here is a classic example of this error from the Family Tree:

Kentucky became a state in 1792. Harrison County was created in 1794. The first permanent settlement in Kentucky was constructed in 1774. The United States did not become an independent country until the Revolutionary War which began in 1775 and ended in 1783. Unless Thomas Hamilton was French or a Native American, it is totally impossible that a marriage took place when and where it is recorded. There are a number of ways to check dates for places in the United States. I suggest using the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries from the Newberry Library. This brings us to the next topic.

3. Adding or changing information to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree without a source citation.

Even if the information added to the Family Tree is correct, without a source citation there is no way a subsequent user can determine that the information is correct without redoing all of the research. In the case of the entry shown in #2 above, the lack of a source citation is understandable because the information is not real. By the way, there is no way to "estimate" the location of an event. For example, the information about the location in Kentucky in the year 1749 cannot be an estimate because the place cannot exist.

4. Making up names or putting in extraneous information for a name.

Again, the example above demonstrates this error. The wife's name, "Mrs. Thomas Hambleton" could not possibly be correct. At one point in time, people would add this space-filler type name in order to do the Temple ordinance work. But putting a Mrs in front of the entry does not really identify anyone. What if this person and more than one unknown wife? Does this wife get the name and the rest go begging?

I have also seen places in the Family Tree where the person's name is "baby" or "Mrs." or even "?" Here are some examples.

In this example, the Mrs is part of the name. By the way, my search in the Family Tree resulted in 547,016,135 entries with Mrs. as part of the name. This error comes from a previous standard accepted by FamilySearch but adding a place holder is nothing more or less than an error. Here is an entry with a question mark.



There are 11 sources listed for Christopher Sanderson and even a Find A Grave record showing a burial date but nothing connecting the Christopher Sanderson to the one born in 1575. If we just leave the entry empty, we can guess that the information is unknown. There is no need for a question mark. Another problem occurs when the title or "Junior" is used as one of the names when there is no source showing that designation as an actual part of the name. With "Junior" for example, that designation did not always mean father and son; it was sometimes used to differentiate between unrelated people who had the same name but different ages.

5.  Failing to do the math.

This is one of the most easily detected errors. Here is an example.

Look at the birth dates listed for the children. Then look at the death date of the father. Do you see a problem? If not, you are part of the problem. When I examine the sources, I have records for two different people named "John Watson" one christened in 1791 and one christened in 1785. Time for more research.

All of these errors can be avoided by careful research and thinking about what you are doing when you add information to the Family Tree. The general rule should be to leave it blank if you don't have a specific source. You can estimate dates but be careful not to estimate an out-of-range date making other dates impossible.