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. 

Explaining FamilySearch Apps as used in a previous post

I recently wrote a blog post entitled "A List of All of the FamilySearch Apps???". The way the post turned out may have caused some confusion. The term "app" has only a vague meaning. It was originally used to refer to the limited programs designed for mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. As these programs became more sophisticated the use of the term "app" became used for more and more programs until even programs for desktop computers are included in the use of the term. For example, see Apple's App Store that has programs such as Microsoft Office 365.

However, I must admit that I used the term "app" somewhat injudiciously and perhaps to expansively. But my use of the term is also reflected in the expansive use by FamilySearch. Yes, FamilySearch has mobile apps that fall into the original use of the term but they also have lots of "hidden" parts of their website that fall into the more expansive category of apps. Here is one example:

https://www.familysearch.org/campaign/pioneers

I was thinking of this type of app when I began to write the previous blog post. I soon discovered that unless I already knew the identities of the apps or extensions or whatever you want to call them, I could not find them on the website. Of course, there are the not too easily found mobile apps in the Solutions Gallery. Here are the ones listed.





But there are also a few that I know about that are even harder to find. One really valuable one is the England Jurisdictions 1851 that hasn't been working for a while. Here is a screenshot:

https://www.familysearch.org/mapp/

While finding these additional "apps" I was overwhelmed with the number of pages on the website. Some of the apps I could remember have been removed. Here is an example.


There apparently is no longer a quick overview of the vast array of historical records and aids for those researching casualties and veterans of the Civil War.

Now I am sorry I used the word "all" in the previous post. I am completely at a loss to figure out how to find all the stuff on the FamilySearch.org website.

A List of All of the FamilySearch Apps???

familysearch.org

Over the past couple of years, FamilySearch.org has announced dozens of apps and specialty pages on the FamilySearch.org website, such as the one shown above announcing "Family History Activities." Almost all of these apps or specialty pages have virtually disappeared over time and it is almost impossible to find a link from any of them on the FamilySearch.org website. You might expect to see some of them on a "Site Map" but even though there is one, only a few of the older pages are listed.

By the way, there is a Site Map. It is linked at the bottom of the startup page. Here is a screenshot:

https://www.familysearch.org/site-map

If you spend some time, you will notice that the Family History Activities are not listed.

I decided to see how many of these invisible pages could be found with a determined Google search. They usually appear with a URL address of "FamilySearch.org/[name of page]" Here is the list so far. I do not pretend to have found all of them, but this was a good attempt. Oh, before I get going on this list, I must mention some of the most obvious hidden pages: the pages for individual states and countries. How do you find these? Well, the best place to look is in The Family History Guide in the Countries section. There are links to all of the pages we know about. Here is a screenshot of England page:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/location/1986340?region=England

Actually, in this case, there is a roundabout way to find this page. You click on the map on the Historical Records page and then click on an area of the world and select a country. These pages come up for each country. Any mention of this huge collection of pages in any other place on the website including the "Site Map?"

Hmm. I had another thought about the website before I get into my list. If you are on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org (LDS.org) website and find a page that looks like the following screenshot, where do the links take you to learn about the FamilySearch.org website?

https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/my-family-history/learn-to-use-family-search?lang=eng&old=true#sign

You might have guessed. The links take you to a link to The Family History Guide.

https://www.lds.org/topics/family-history/my-family-history/learn-to-use-family-search?lang=eng&old=true#sign

So your best source for finding all this stuff is in The Family History Guide.

Am I finally going to get to my list? Well, that depends on whether or not I keep finding other obscure stuff. Yes, I actually used a program that will list all the pages instead of looking for them with a Google search. The results were pretty scary. The list ran on for thousands of pages. No wonder some of these previously announced pages get lost. I finally got tired of watching the list grow and grow, Here is a screenshot of part of the list.

I left the list running a growing because I ran out of time when it got listing all the 89,000+ FamilySearch Research Wiki pages. No wonder stuff gets lost.

So how do we find stuff like the Pioneer Discovery Page that came up last year? Well, it appears that those types of pages are temporary and now lead to dead links. Meanwhile, the list keeps growing.

Announcing The Family History Guide Knowledgebase

We are announcing a major addition to The Family History Guide: the new Knowledgebase.

https://www.thefhguide.com/research.html

Here is the description from a recent blog post:

Two of the main purposes of The Family History Guide are to accelerate your family history learning and research. What better way to assist with those goals, than with a handy reference that offers definitions, tips, guidelines and more. We are excited to announce the first release of our Knowledgebase for The Family History Guide, which covers general research principles and United States research. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress: we will be adding more topics and content as time goes on.
In the drop-down menus, there are several places where you can find the Knowledgebase:

• FamilySearch menu, below “Discover”
• Ancestry menu, below “Research”
• MyHeritage menu, below “Research”
• Findmypast menu, below “Research”
• Countries menu, below “United States”

We think you will find this a fabulous resource in additional to all the other resources on the website.

Who gets lost in the FamilySearch Family Tree?

Let's suppose that I find a person who is not part of my ancestral family on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and I decide to "Detach" that person from the family. Where does that person go? Let's further suppose that I find that a parent shown for one of the people in my ancestral line is not really related to my family. Again, I detach my ancestor from the person shown in the Family Tree. But the person in the Family Tree has a whole list of ancestors perhaps going all the way back to Adam. What happens to that liberated family line?

All of these are interesting questions. But they all have the same answer: Nothing. There is a big difference between detaching a relationship and deleting a person. Here is the rule about deleting a person from the Family Tree. See Deleting a person's record from Family Tree.

You can delete a deceased person's record from Family Tree if you are the one that created the record and no other contributor has changed it. The message "Delete Person Unavailable" appears if you cannot delete a person. 

You can also delete a living person's record if it appears in your private spaces. 

When you delete a record, these changes occur:

•  Family Tree removes any relationships to other individuals.
• The record can no longer be modified.
• The record can only be searched by ID number.

What does this mean? It means what it says. You cannot delete a person you did not personally add to the Family Tree. But what happens when you detach a person from a relationship?

The answer to this question depends on whether or not the person detached has other relationships in the Family Tree. I the person is really the only instance of that person in the Family Tree or in other words, has no duplicates, then that person will still be in the database but will be floating unattached. Will the person ever get attached back to the main Family Tree? Yes, if someone enters a duplicate of that person and the program finds the floating individual and merges him or her as a duplicate. By the way, this happens all the time.

What if there is a whole ancestral line detached and floating out there in the Family Tree? Then if someone searches for an individual in the line or adds a duplicate of one of the individuals in the line, then the floating segment of the Family Tree will get reattached. Nothing is really lost.

In effect, all of the "duplicate" entries you find in the Family Tree represent these floaters that exist on alternative little Family Tree segments that are either floating around or attached to some other segment of the Family Tree.

This concept may seem a little strange but it is something you see frequently as you are merging individuals.

There are some imaginary people in the Family Tree beside the mythological connections back to Adam. Here is an example:



Hypothetically, this person might exist, but this entry appears at the end of a line. All of the dates and even the names are made up. There are no sources showing that this person existed back in the 1400s. There are no records showing the birth of any children or a marriage.  If this person is a valid entry in the Family Tree then we could simply keep adding identical entries every few years into the past until the line extends back to the Age of Dinosaurs or the creation of the world or whatever. However, interestingly, this type of entry was allowed under the rules for ordinance work many years ago. You were allowed to add a surname and a Mrs. wife so that the sealing ordinance could be done for this hypothetical couples supposed child. This rule no longer exists. But what do I do with this entry? Nothing.

If we someday find the actual existence of this particular family, there is already a placeholder person in the Family Tree. Actually, there are several generations of Jarvis ancestors that have no sources and who jump from one county to another in England beginning back in the 1600s. The entries jump from Wilshire, England to a Jarvis couple who were both born and died in Somerset, about 60 miles away. I am reminded of the First Rule of Genealogy: When the baby was born, the mother was there.

Oh, well, I might get around to detaching this unrelated ancestral line but I still have to determine if it is broken somewhere closer to the present.

A Question about the Ordinances Ready App

I received an email comment concerning the potential restrictions on the number of people who can be reserved for ordinances on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The commentator expressed dismay at the limitation because he was concerned that he would not have "enough" ordinances for his family.  The comment was sent in response to a presentation which I did recently. Here is my reply:

Perhaps you didn't understand that the Ordinances Ready app is the answer. Each person is supposed to use the app for his or her own names. So, if you have a grandchild who is able to go to the Temple, he or she logs into FamilySearch and can get names from their own list or the from the following order: 

1. It pulls names from your own reservation list on FamilySearch.org
2. It pulls from any ordinances you personally have shared with the Temples
3. It pulls names related to you from the global temple list of shared names
4. It finally walks up and down your lines looking for other available ordinances (i.e.
green icons)
5. If none of these work, it pulls a name of an ancestor from the global temple list 

Essentially, you can use the app to recapture names that you personally have shared with the Temple. You can also do what I do. I maintain an "unreserved list." Because I had so many names on my list, I "unreserved" some of them, i.e. turned them into green icons on the Family Tree. I put all of these "unreserved" names on a list on Google Docs or Word so that if I needed more names, I could add them to my Temple list assuming someone in the family had not found them previously and done the work. With a limit, we do not have to be concerned that someone else will hoard the names and not do the work.

I hope that helps to explain why having a limit will not be a burden on anyone. Once you reach your limit, keep on finding names and put them on your unreserved list. Then you will have all the names you need. But the whole idea is that your family can use the Ordinances Ready app to do work you, a close relative, have shared with the Temples. 

For example, I do not have any baptisms on my Temple list right now but I can go to the Ordinances Ready list and get four names from my shared names or from the shared names of my close relatives if I needed to do so. 

Of course, the question goes deeper than a simple concern about maintaining a cushion of ordinances for family members. The key issue is that historically members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have long relied upon the work of a few dedicated genealogical researchers, not only to provide names for Temple ordinances but also to do all of the genealogical research for a family.  I see the transition from this traditional model to emphasizing the need for each person, including young people, to be actively involved in the process.

Because the Ordinances Ready app draws primarily from the names which have been already submitted, whether or not the names are duplicates or unrelated is essentially moot. The names have already been submitted.

Hopefully, the members of the Church will not use the Ordinances Ready app as an excuse to avoid doing any original research.

The Family History Guide Reaches Thousands at RootsTech 2019

thefhguide.com

The report is in from Bob Taylor of The Family History Guide. I thought I would share some of the comments and statistics. I spent quite a bit of time at The Family History Guide booth, but I was busy with presentations, classes, networking, interviews and just visiting most of the time. However, my wife Ann taught several of the classes at the booth and we all helped the patrons. We had some wonderful volunteers who did a great job of helping.

Here are some samples of what we heard about The Family History Guide at RootsTech 2019:

• “You’ve made my RootsTech experience worth the time and money it cost me to be here.”
• “Why haven’t we been told about this incredible tool?”
• “You’re the answer to my prayers.”
• “I’m no longer scared of my calling.”
• “Wow, is this cool or what”!
• “I have plenty of encouragement as to why I should do family history. What I need is a tool to help me be successful in my consultant calling, and that’s what The Family History Guide has been for me.”
• “With The Family History Guide, I feel like I am at the opening of a gold mine with a cart next to me.”
• “I feel like I could do cartwheels out of the Salt Palace after hearing this presentation on The Family History Guide; I’m so excited about what I learned!”
• “l was listening to what the people around me were saying. They all said they were SO glad they attended this seminar – that it was so good and so clear, it should have been an entire conference itself.”

These are real quotes, I heard some of them myself and sometimes more than once. You know, for many people learning about The Family History Guide is like they were lost in the wilderness and suddenly finding a map, a working GPS, and guide book. Here are some statistics about the event.

• The Thursday presentation in Ballroom B had 1,100 attendees, with a room capacity of 1,200.
• The Saturday presentation was at the close of RootsTech when many attendees had already left, but there were about 250 there, over 2/3 of which were family history consultants.
• Mini-classes at the booth totaled 317 attendees.
• The total number of demos given at the booth was approximately 1,600.
• Total people directly reached with a demo, mini-class, or full presentation: over 3,200.

We are already looking forward to RootsTech in London and RootsTech 2020.