What documents need to be added to the FamilySearch Memories?

From time to time the issue arises as to what should and what should not be added to the Memories section of the FamilySearch.org website. There is an initial issue as to the distinction between "photos" and "documents." Photos contain people and places. Documents have words and information beyond what is depicted. The difference is a matter of opinion to some extent. If an image is added as a photo, it can easily be moved to become a document by simply checking the box provided in the Details section of the program. Here is a screenshot showing a photo with an arrow showing the Details section link and another arrow indicating the check box.

This option will only appear if you are the person who contributed the photo. 

This still leaves a question as to what should be added as documents. There are a significant number of people who feel that copies of U.S. Census Records should be added as well as copies of any other source documents that are discovered. The supporting argument for this position is that the document may not be available in the future and it is a good idea to add the document to the Memories section so a copy is always available. I guess my counter argument is that those who add these documents almost never provide the full citation to where the copy came from. I guess the question is really moot, since we do not (yet) have the ability to edit any of the Memories provided by others except to add tags and other such additional information.

I do suggest that those adding any type of memory check to see if what they are adding is a duplicate however.

The Earliest LDS Church Records

Many of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have ancestors who came through Utah after joining the Church elsewhere. Although the Church population as a whole has shifted from the United States to countries outside of the United States, (See Facts and Statistics from the LDS.org Newsroom). Additionally, by the way, again according to the Newsroom, there are 4,918 Family History Centers Worldwide.

From time to time, I am asked questions that must be resolved from early Church records. Many of these records are available on microfilm, a few are published in books and some are available only in restricted collections at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. The main repository for early Church records is the The Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 2015, I wrote a brief post on Researching Early LDS Records, but I thought it a good idea to update and expand on that post. I have found that several of my own ancestors are mentioned in the historical records of the Church.

Although, in the past, many of the earliest records of the Church were inaccessible, there has been a concerted effort for many years now to make them more available. Many of the Church's documents, journals, administrative records, revelations and translations, histories, legal, business and financial records are now online and freely available on The Joseph Smith Papers website. Many other digitized documents are available on The Church History Library website.

The place to start your research is the Church History Catalog.

For example, a search on my surname, "Tanner," showed 2,075 results. Subsequent searches on specific ancestors showed books, manuscripts and collections of papers.

Other places to search include the FamilySearch.org Catalog and the FamilySearch.org Research Wiki. Some of the notable records include the Early Church Information File, LDS Membership Records, and LDS Patriarchal Blessings.

A Digital Scorecard

How many records, book, periodicals, and other items have actually been digitized? How many of those digitized items are genealogically relevant? Is there really an answer to either or both of these questions?

The real answer to these questions is very complex and elusive at the same time. But what is more and more evident is that much of what is out there in the world's historical records is being gobbled up by the digital juggernaut. Even if you spent nearly every waking hour of every day, it would now be impossible to even begin to understand the amount of information online and available at the click of a virtual button.

As regularly as the frequency in a cesium atom, I get comments from genealogical researchers about how they have searched and searched and now have no more records to search. My answer is always the same, you cannot begin to imagine how many records there are and how many more there are that you can search.

In all of this, we depend heavily on a few very limiting factors, our time to search, our skill and ability to search, our resources for traveling and searching, our persistence, our imagination and our background in the area we are searching. All these factors and many more influence whether or not we can continue to find records when we seem to be at a dead end. Even for those with extraordinary online search skills, finding pertinent digital records among the billions online is a daunting task. In finding those records we are at the mercy of the quality of the individual search engines used by each website.

Granted, in today's world, we may come to the end of the availability of digital records in any very small geographic area or subject. We still may be out looking at paper records, but the parameters of our digital world are expanding at an ever increasing rate.

Let's look at some of the numbers as of the date of this post.  First the large online family history websites and their lists of records.

• FamilySearch.org -- billions of records in 2101 collections and 282,516 books and periodicals 
• MyHeritage.com -- 6,937,037,375 historical records including 447,870 books and publications
• Ancestry.com -- billions of records in 32,611 collections
• Findmypast.com -- over two billion records

Next, here are some of the numbers from the more general online digital collections. 

• Google Books -- probable estimate over 32 million
• HathiTrust.org -- 14,559,728 total volumes
• Internet Archive -- 10,024,405 books with 50,562 genealogy books
• Online Books Page -- over 2 million free books on the web
• Digital Public Library of America -- 13,056,964 items with 151,997 genealogy items
• Trove.nla.gov.au -- 493,366,855 items online with 149,226 results for genealogy
• Europeana.eu -- 53,203,536 items online

If you really want to explore some more online collections, see the following websites.

• Harvard Library, Library Research Guide for History
• WorldCat.org -- over 2 billion catalog entries
• OAIster.worldcat.org -- a specialized search engine of more than 30 million records
• ArchiveGrid.org -- over 4 million records in archives in the United States
• OldMapsOnline.org-- searches for over 400,000 maps

Let's just say we are never through looking and there is more every day. Just one example, in watching MyHeritage.com, it appears that this one website is adding about 100,000,000 or so records every month or less. 

Don't get overwhelmed and don't give up. 

Be a FamilySearch Expert just published by FamilyHistoryExpos

Family History Expos has just published another in its series of research guides. The newest addition is Be a FamilySearch Expert. This 204 page book is authored by Holly T. Hansen, James L. Tanner and Kimberly A. Savage. It is available on Amazon.com and on the new FamilyHistoryExpos.com website. Here is the description of the book from Amazon.com:

This Research Guide will give you an in-depth look at FamilySearch.org. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the various databases available to you through this program which will greatly expand your research toolkit. Learn how to use the Help Center, the Training Center, and FamilySearch Memories. Discover the powerful capability of FamilySearch Family Tree to preserve your family history findings. Step-by-step instructions about setting up a family, verifying and correcting existing data, and documenting and adding sources to individuals’ and couples’ records. Find out how easy it is to use the new layout of the Research Wiki and what tremendous resources await you there. Learn how the FamilySearch Catalog, WorldCat, and ArchivGrid work together to point you in exciting new directions for your research. An often-overlooked collection, Historical Records, may hold that elusive clue to your brick wall if you know how to use it. FamilySearch Indexing, FamilySearch Books, and FamilySearch Genealogies will all be covered.

 This is the newest addition to the extensive series of books already available on genealogical research.

Adding Photos without Provenance to the FamilySearch.org Memories

Provenance is the most important factor in definitely identifying old photos, especially very early photos from the mid-1800s. Provenance is defined as a record of ownership of a work of art, photograph or antique that is used a guide in determining the authenticity of quality. In short, you have to be able to determine the history of the photograph. My daughter Amy has outlined this issue very specifically in a blog post about a photo that has been circulating for years with claims that it represents one of our distant ancestors. Her outline comes from a blog post on TheAncestorFiles blog entitled, "Poor John Tanner."

As noted in my analysis of the possible photograph of John Tanner's relative-by-marriage Samuel Shepherd, a picture needs to meet several tests:

• What is the provenance of the picture? (Who owns it and why? What is the chain of ownership?)
• Is there an identification included with the picture? Who made it?
• Is the technology appropriate to the time it was supposed to have been taken?
• Were there daguerreotypists or photographers operating in the area at the time?
• Any family resemblances?
• Do the ages of the people in the photograph seem to be accurate?
• What can the clothing tell us about when the picture was taken?
• What other details in the picture help locate the picture and identify the subjects?

We run into the problem from time to time with the photos that are uploaded to the Memories section of the FamilySearch.org website. We are almost continually involved in controversial photo claims for our ancestor John Tanner. This is in part due to the huge number of his descendants and fact that a number of books have been published about his life. One interesting fact about the alleged photos circulating is that they cannot all be possibly accurate. I hesitate to re-publish either of the alleged photos because of their unwarranted proliferation. Instead, I will refer you to the extensive writing on the subject by my daughter in TheAncestorFiles blog. She has an index to her blog posts by the name of the ancestor so it is easy to find all of the posts on John Tanner.

Mis-identified photos will continue to be problem that will grow as more and more photos are uploaded to the Memories section of the FamilySearch.org website. For example, right now, John Tanner (b. 1778, d. 1850) has 17 photos. four of them are copies of the same disputed photo showing a family group and two are copies of another disputed photo. If you are interested, you can view John Tanner's Memories with his ID number, MMM9-MM1. You might also need to be aware that he has possible duplicates that cannot be merged at this time and that the duplicate has a total of 165 memories including two more copies of the first disputed photograph (actually a daguerreotype) and an original song recorded about him.

One of the realities of the Internet is that photos and other items can be spread almost instantaneously without any supporting validation at all. Their proliferation creates a new "reality" where a photo or story becomes so prevalent that it is accepted as true without substantiation. As we have found, it is virtually impossible to correct such a spread once it begins. This is especially true when we have no way to delete or edit photos or other items uploaded to the Memories section.

Highlights of the App Gallery -- All the Stories

From time to time, I like to go back to the FamilySearch.org App Gallery and see what's new and useful. A relatively new addition to the App Gallery is the "All the Stories" app. The App has a rather spar start-up page with nothing more than a brief explanation and a login button.

The screen only changes slightly when you login.

Once you arrive here, the program begins to look for stories attached to your relative's Memories pages. Here is what I found after the program searched for a while. You can stop any time, but I decided to let the program keep running to see what I would get. This is what the program finally found.

Hovering over any one of the dots shows the name of the person and clicking on the dot gives a linked list of the stories.

This is the type of program that would be a good addition to the Memories section of the main FamilySearch.org website.

How to Determine Accuracy in Family Tree Entries

When you begin investigating your ancestry in today[s world, you are soon introduced into the confusing and overwhelmingly large pool of online family trees. One of the concepts that newly minted family historians have to grapple with is the reliability or accuracy of the information presented in the millions of online family trees. It is overly simplistic to merely assume their validity, but on the other hand, how do you know whether or not the information presented is accurate or inaccurate?

One of first crisis events in a new researcher's life is when they discover that their respected elderly ancestors were sometimes sloppy and inaccurate in their family history records. On the other hand, it is way too facile to dismiss inherited information as unreliable merely because it is old and lacks source citations. But it also a mistake to assume that merely because your ancestor recorded the information from personal knowledge that the information is correct. There are many instances where people's memories were faulty or even situations where they lied about the facts and dates.

Fortunately, there are some methods of detecting errors and some common indicators that what is recorded is likely to be wrong. However, carried to an extreme, you may end up like me, categorically disbelieving almost any unverified fact or event claimed by an ancestor.

Over my long years of examining family records from a huge variety of sources, I have evolved my own strategy for evaluating family information. I will use the FamilySearch.org Family Tree as my primary example of how I evaluate the information. I do this because the Family Tree is a compilation of over 100 years' worth of records and does a good job of illustrating both the good and the bad aspects of what has been accumulated.

It is extremely easy today to "copy" someone's family tree in its entirety. We often assume that the proliferation of online family trees is primarily derived from the mindless and uncritical copying of family trees accumulated by a very few "true" researchers. However, the true situation is much more complicated than this simplistic explanation would seem to indicate. Especially with the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, the information is a composite and not necessarily the result of copied information. To the extent that some information was "copied" from generation to generation in the Church, there are likely some errors that were reproduced, but most of the inconsistencies and errors in the tree are more attributable to previous issues of methodology and lack of current verification from valid source records or documents.

Here are some examples with commentary on the types of errors that exist and how they affect the determination of accuracy on the part of a user of the Family Tree program. The first is a daughter listed with William Stewart (b. 1740, d. 1826) and Amy Huntington (b. 1751, d. 1839).

This is a prime example of incomplete and probably inaccurate information. If your family has been submitting information to FamilySearch and its predecessors for some time, you can undoubtedly go back on some family lines until you reach a relative or ancestor with this type of information. The giveaway here is that the birth place is still in abbreviations. This means essentially that no one has work on updating the information or standardizing the place names. This situation is a flag to me that the entry is really speculation and not verified.

There are no sources listed for this person so any verification of the information will require research. The effect of having a person like this in your family tree, whether it be the FamilySearch.org Family Tree or in another program, is that you have no basis for either relying on the accuracy of the entry or doing additional research on this person's ancestors.

It would seem that all of this information is derived or calculated from some sort of early record. What is the main problem is that by being formatted in this fashion with an "of" as part of the place, the Family Tree program probably be unable to provide any record hints. My best guess for this person is that she is not the daughter of of William and Amy Stewart but a person named Content Douglass who married a Samuel Stewart. Unfortunately, this family is out in the New England part of the Family Tree that cannot be fixed until the Family Tree is separated from new.FamilySearch.org.

Next is an example that is a little more complicated but essentially the same.

The death information seems to be specific and complete, but the birth information is just a vague as the previous record but in this case, there is a reference to a marriage record and two legacy new.FamilySearch.org sources. The marriage date is likely accurate and is supported by the citation to a marriage source. The two things that catch my attention are the lack of a complete middle name and the "Abt" designation for the date. It is acceptable to estimate dates and give the best place found, but when this is done, it is customary to be aware that the information may not be accurate and could be misleading. There are four sources cited but none of them confirm a birth date or place.

The next example is another classic case of misinformation personified.

This appears to be a valid entry except for the fact that there are no sources cited and the fact that Rhode Island was first settled by Roger Williams in 1636 so it would have been difficult for Francis Tanner to be born in a place that did not exist at the time. This is a particularly common problem with locations that turn out not to exist at the time the event is supposed to have happened. If the documents tend to show that the person did exist, then the dates may simply be wrong. But in this case the information here is used to add additional generations.

The key here is to take the time to examine the entries and think about what they say. If there are sources, do they support the dates and places or merely take up space.