A Guide for Entering Information in the FamilySearch Family Tree

A Guide for Entering Information in the FamilySearch Family Tree - James Tanner

I have to find a balance between producing new presentations for Brigham Young University Family History Library webinars and writing. These presentations are gobbling up a huge amount of time. Not that I am complaining at all. I think it is just a transition from one media format to another.

This particular video is high in data density. But as I review the last few videos we have uploaded, I see a lot of really high density topics. Compared to the usual YouTube offerings, our viewing numbers are not spectacular, but considering the small number of genealogists who are into the online community, we are gratified with the response we have had so far. Thanks for watching our videos and you can expect a lot more in the future. Remember to subscribe to our YouTube Channel. BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel.

Earlybird Registration for RootsTech 2017 Ends Soon!

Earlybird pricing for RootsTech.org 2017 is scheduled to end on the 19th of October, 2017. The Conference is scheduled for February 8th through the 11th, 2017 in the Salt Palace in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. Click here for a pass comparison.

There may still be a few hotel rooms left right downtown but it is getting late to find anything available. Fortunately, Salt Lake City has a lot of hotels so accommodations are probably available even if you have to search some distance away from the Salt Palace. Since we moved to Utah, we have taken the FrontRunner train from Provo and also stayed with relatives who live in Salt Lake City.

Weather in Salt Lake City in February is highly unpredictable. It could be cold and sunny or cold and snowy. Remember, Salt Lake City is high in the mountains and plan accordingly.

The Salt Palace is just south of the Family History Library and just a little southwest of Temple Square. It also right across the street from the huge City Creek Shopping Area with lots of restaurants and stores. The Trax light rail transit system in on South Temple, just north of the Salt Palace.

All Pedigrees End

Why You Can't Trace Your Lineage Back to Adam - James Tanner

Some time ago, we posted this video on the Brigham Young University Family History Library YouTube Channel. This was actually the first video in our ongoing series of webinars and instructional videos that now numbers 188 and will soon pass 200. It has been extremely interesting to see the impact these videos have had on my own involvement with the BYU Family History Library and on those who have watched the videos. Obviously, our video collection goes back over 2 years, but the webinar series is still quite new. The Family History Library had already begun uploading short instructional videos to the YouTube Channel before I arrived in Provo and almost all of those early videos are still relevant and online. 

The topic of this particular video about tracing your ancestry "back to Adam" has repeatedly come up in conversations with the missionaries and patrons at the library. I have a standing challenge to everyone that given ten or fifteen minutes with your particular pedigree, I can show you where there are serious problems and/or the pedigree effectively ends. I have been taken up on this challenge a couple of times in the last two weeks. 

Here is an example of what I am talking about from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. 

In this particular case, the red warning icons from FamilySearch clearly indicate the point at which this particular line effectively ends. Although the names in the line seem to extend the pedigree beyond the entry for "Garrand Morgan" there are, in fact, no supporting documents that carry the line any further back. The person shown as the father, as I have pointed out previously in other posts, labeled as "John Morgan (Doctor) is supposed to have been born in 1734 in Shepherdstown, Berkeley, Virginia, long before either the town or the county were in existence. The land where Shepherdstown now stands was only acquired by its namesake, Thomas Shepherd, in 1734 but the town was not established and granted a charter until 1762. By the way, at that time the town was named Mecklenburg. Notwithstanding these historical events, the next person in the pedigree, Jacob Morgan is also reported to have been born in Shepherdstown in 1723 and he apparently, at least from what is recorded in the Family Tree, had his son John Morgan when he was 11 years old. 

I bring this up again because of the repeated claims by some that they have traced their lineage "back to Adam." Whereas, I find only a very few people who have documented even one line back even six or seven generations and most pedigrees effectively end in no more than 10 to 12 generations even with careful documentation. When I say this, I always have someone try to show me a longer pedigree and it is entirely possible that some do exist, but even with the unified Family Tree, combining the efforts of hundreds of genealogists over a long period of time, such documented genealogies are extremely rare. 

The point here is not to discourage those who have done carefully documented work extending their pedigrees into the dim past, but to indicate that even with careful documentation, those pedigrees do not extend back into prehistory. Even those people who are indignant and insist that they have carefully documented their extensive pedigrees, have to admit that at some point they began to rely on unsubstantiated, published genealogies. 

We all have a lot of work to be done on more of our lines than we will ever be able to document. Let's start focusing on correcting the existing, much more recent, genealogy on the Family Tree and leave the issue of extending lines back into the Middle Ages to those with the research tools to do that work. 

Four New Videos Added to the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel

Our Brigham Young University Family History Library YouTube Channel just keep rolling along adding new videos almost every week. We would encourage you to subscribe to the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel to receive postings of any updated videos. It has been extremely interesting to produce these videos over the past year or so. We have started to have a number of comments about them from patrons at the Library. We are always happy to receive suggestions for future videos, although we are already working on the schedule for November.

Here are four of the newest ones added:

When the Baby was Born, the Mother was There and other Research Rules - James Tanner

Using Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Research to Extend Your Pedigree - Marilyn Thomsen

FamilySearch: Obscure Elements Revealed by Ann Tanner

Google Searches at Warp Speed and Accuracy - James Tanner

Yes, Ann Tanner is my wife and she is also an accomplished genealogist.

Standard dates and places in the FamilySearch Family Tree

NOTE: This is another post where you need to read the comments. There is some really good information in addition to what I wrote originally.

This entry in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree looks fine to most users of the program. However, in an attempt to establish some uniformity in dates and place names and to increase the accuracy of record hints and searches, there has been for some time a system of standardized dates and place names. If I edit this particular entry, I will see the suggested standardized place name.

In some cases, even though the date looks identical to the suggested standard, the date hasn't been "standardized" and a warning will come up in the program to that effect. However, in viewing this entry, there are some other considerations.

The rule to follow with regards to place names is that the place needs to be recorded as it was at the time the event occurred. Here Utah became a state in 1896, so the designation "Utah" is inaccurate. Even though the suggested standard agrees, there are really more choices.

The "correct" choice is as follows:

To substitute the "correct" place name, you click your cursor to the right of the text to be changed and hit the spacebar. The choices above will appear and you can then select the most appropriate choice. 

Here is the saved entry:

If you do not find a "correct" entry among the choices shown and you know your entry is correct, then click outside of the box on the screen somewhere and your entry will be preserved. 

Strange reaction to the FamilySearch Partner Programs

The FamilySearch.org Partner Programs have been available for free to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for some considerable time now. But despite the availability of these fabulously valuable research programs, there is still a huge lack of interest in even signing up for the programs.

As a very recent example, last night, I was helping a patron at the Brigham Young University Family History Library who had come in for help in finding his English ancestors. He turned out to be an experience researcher with some very specific needs for English parish records. In the course of beginning to help him, I began to refer to Findmypast.com as the place to begin his research. He had not even signed up to use the program. This would not be surprising from a member who was not interested in genealogy and had not even registered for FamilySearch.org or used the program as I commonly find, but it is surprising that so many of the people doing their own research and even using the Family Tree, that I deal with on a regular basis, have yet to signup for even one of the Partner Programs.

Just in the past few days, I taught a class at the BYU Family History Library about MyHeritage.com. There were about twenty people in the class and only two of them had used the program when I asked the question about who was using the program.

When people start to use the programs, they become very enthusiastic about the additional research opportunities. I hear positive feedback about all the Partner Programs. But the addition of Geneanet.com has highlighted the issue of the overall acceptance or even awareness of what the programs are and what they can do. Even among those who are doing their own genealogy on a regular basis, I have yet to find anyone familiar with the latest addition.

I do think that the existence of the partner programs could be more prominently available on the FamilySearch.org program than they presently are; tucked away in the Get Help menu. I also think the list of programs might be better presented to help explain what each programs can do for the researcher. But despite the fact that each of these programs promotes their own program extensively, my perspective is that the average FamilySearch.org user seems oblivious to the opportunities presented.

I am doing what I can to teach and promote all of the programs. So far, some of my most popular YouTube.com videos on the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel deal with the partner programs and I routinely use the programs for classes and when helping people individually. But I can only do so much to promote the programs.

Watching the FamilySearch Family Tree

Each of the individual detail pages in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree have a provision for watching the entries.

When you "Watch" a person by clicking on the star, the button turns to "Unwatch." As a consequence, FamilySearch will then send you a weekly notification of any changes made by any user to the details page of the watched individuals. Here is a screenshot of part of my current list of changes:

I carefully review this list every week. In most cases, I am aware of the people working on the entries and can merely skim over the changes. But in some cases, I need to click on the links to the individuals in the Family Tree and see what has changed to make sure that the changes are correctly made and supported by adequate documentation.

If I have some question about the changes, I can then either make my own corrections or changes or attempt to contact the person making the changes. My response is determined by the nature of the change. Many of the changes are made by people I know and so I do not need to do anything about what they have done. For example, my daughters are involved in making coordinated edits to some of our ancestors and we talk frequently about the changes. In some cases, such as the ones shown in this screenshot, the changes are questionable.

In this case, the John Tanner family is extensively documented. There are no "unknown" children to add to the family unless someone has extensive documentation otherwise. So, I immediately checked to see what had happened.

Apparently someone added a child and then deleted the child after realizing that the addition was not correct. Here is the detail page of the change.

Here is what the Relationship page showed for this change.

The addition of the child was removed when the person realized that the wrong parents had been selected.

If the child had not been removed, then I would have removed the child and noted the reason that the child did not belong in that family. FamilySearch suggests that we can contact the individual to discuss the issue. I think that is appropriate if there is a question as to the validity of the change. In my case, in this notice I had 221 changes. In each case, I have to make a careful decision about what to do, including contacting the person about the entry. The Tanner family is in a state of flux right now because the duplicate issue has only recently been resolved. We are still getting some really interesting issues such as this supposed photo of William Francis Tanner who apparently lived from 1657 to 1740 about a hundred years or so before photography was invented.

This particular depiction of William Tanner is most certainly inaccurate and unsupported, but I am not quite ready to start into the correction process. I have done extensive research on this family and it is on my list as one of my next projects. But right now I am mostly monitoring the situation and hoping that someone comes up with some real documentation.

Family Tree also provides a list of all the people you are watching. Here is a screenshot of part of my list.

I am currently watching 214 people but this number will very likely increase as I continue to do work on correcting and documenting the entries. The Watch list is a very useful tool for maintaining the integrity of the Family Tree but it does involve some work.