What are good and bad changes to the FamilySearch Family Tree?

According to my Watch List on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, I am watching 289 people. That means that if any changes are made to those people FamilySearch will send me a weekly list of the changes. As you can see from this last week's notice, I had 210 changes to 28 people. By the way, most of those changes are to the same people every week. I review all of the changes every week. I look at the type of change made and who made the changes. For example, the change shown above was made by my daughter. Since the change involved adding a document and was made by a person I know to be competent, I don't have to do anything at all about the change. This is a "constructive" change.

It is the nature of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree to change. Interestingly, almost all of the complaints I listen to about the Family Tree deal with some kind of change. Those complaints started within a day or two of the first introduction of the program years ago and I just received a long list of complaints from my blog readers about some new changes to the Family Tree. The complaints haven't changed since the first day I began to hear them. I have written dozens of blog posts on the subject of change in the Family Tree on both this blog and on Genealogy's Star. Some time ago, when I started writing this blog, I transferred all my topics dealing with FamilySearch and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to this blog. There is some spillover but this blog deals with issues that are raised mainly for members of the Church and about the Church.

The FamilySearch Family Tree has a lot of users who are not members of the Church. Since the Family Tree is immensely useful for everyone, regardless of their membership status, there are issues that extend well beyond the main focus of this blog. Change to cooperative online family trees such as the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is one of those issues.

Most of the online family trees are "owned" by one individual. For example, I have family trees on Ancestry.com, Findmypast.com, MyHeritage.com, Geni.com, WikiTree.org and many other websites. I am the only person who can make changes to some of those online family trees. Both Geni.com and WikiTree.org are collaborative websites based on the wiki model just as is the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. The FamilySearch.org website is somewhat unique in its association with the Church and its open collaborative nature. Because of this association, there are a substantial number of users of the Family Tree that do not have a significant amount of experience with other online family tree programs. There are also many of these people who also have little or no online computer experience beyond social networking and other popular online venues. In addition, the number of people who are interested in genealogy and familiar with genealogical research and who also are on the Family Tree is vanishingly small.

Since the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is open to the world and because change is part of the nature of the program, there are going to be a lot of changes made that are not constructive. My attitude towards this is so what? It comes with having a program where the benefits far outweigh the annoyance of having changes made to the information available in the program.

The underlying concept of the Family Tree is to collaboratively allow incremental changes to any of the information (data) to thereby increase both the amount and accuracy of that information. Initially, the Family Tree was seeded with a huge amount of information that had accumulated for over 100 years. The core of this information was accurate, but much of it was duplicative or inaccurate. The challenge was to provide a venue where this accumulated information could be corrected and the duplicate information removed. The Family Tree does all that admirably. As more sources are added to the Family Tree it becomes more accurate and therefore more useful. However, the number of changes will not necessarily decrease over time because more information will always become available and more people will be added to the Family Tree.

Good changes add to the cumulative information in the Family Tree and good changes also correct inaccurate or incomplete information. Good changes also provide sources that explain where the changed or added information originated, i.e. a source in Memories or a citation to an outside source. Bad changes are those that remove correct information and substitute incorrect information. Bad sources also include information that is added without a source. By the way, personal knowledge is a source, but most of the time it cannot be validated. But if you don't know where the information came from, it is probably inaccurate. Many bad sources are added to the Family Tree by people who fail to read the information and sources already attached to a person. If a person in the Family Tree has multiple sources, why would you assume that the information already in the Family Tree is inaccurate simply because your unsupported records differ from what is already there?

For example, my ancestor John Tanner KWJ1-K2F has 231 Memories and 96 sources. Notwithstanding this massive amount of information, people still add wives and children and then those relationships are deleted. These kinds of "bad" changes give the whole Family Tree a bad reputation.

The bad changes to the Family Tree are like weeds in a garden. No matter how many times you pull weeds, there are always more. But you don't stop gardening simply because you have to pull weeds.

If there is a real dispute about the identity of an ancestor or whether or not a child belongs in a certain family, then these issues should be resolved through collaboration. Think about it.

Remember, the MyHeritage Tree Sync is in Beta

I have been seeing some semi-hysterical comments about the MyHeritage.com Tree Sync program with FamilySearch.org. This is a subtle reminder that the program is in BETA testing. When the CEO of MyHeritage, Gilad Japhet, gave his presentation at RootsTech, he mentioned that they had about 100 BETA testers. In order to use the program, you have to request a code from MyHeritage. This alone should be a clue that there might be problems with the BETA program. So why are there such emotional complaints about the functions of a program that is still officially in development? Who knows?

Some of the most serious complaints are about difficulties with the BETA test and sources in the FamilySearch Family Tree that have now been fixed.  If you aren't able to take the bad with the good in a BETA test, I suggest that you wait for a final release of the program. Personally, I have been using the program for a couple of months now and I am thrilled with the program. You can read what I think in some of my previous posts.

Also, if you do have a real issue with the BETA test, the whole idea is to communicate your concerns back to MyHeritage. Venting in public about the problems is not responsible or logical. By the way, the MyHeritage.com Tree Sync program will be considered one of the most important steps in the development of online family trees. It basically gives LDS members who now use the Family Tree the ability to use, MyHeritage, a hugely effective program with nearly 9 billion records in a way that will enhance both programs immensely.

The Duplicate Source Issue on the FamilySearch Family Tree

First of all the duplicate source issue is really a bogus issue. The FamilySearch.org Family Tree allows you to add sources to records supporting any entry made. The real issue is people who make changes and do not add a source for those changes, not people who add more than one copy of a single source. There is absolutely no harm done to the information in the Family Tree when someone adds a "duplicate" source. If you are bothered by the duplicate source, then detach it. But before you do, think about whether it is a duplicate or an alternative source for the information. There is a real difference.

If I attach a reference (source) to the Family Tree saying I got my information from FamilySearch for a 1930 U.S. Census record for a family and someone comes along and adds another reference or citation or source to the same record, so what? Why do you care? But what if I find the same record on Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.com or whatever, is that a duplicate source? Or is it another "source" for the same information. Maybe I want to know I can find the U.S. Census records on more than one website. In that sense, the second reference or citation is not a duplicate and when you remove or detach the duplicate, you are removing valuable information from the Family Tree.

Let's move on from this issue of "duplicate" sources and focus on getting as much information into the Family Tree as we can.

See What are Sources on the FamilySearch Family Tree?

Answering questions about the MyHeritage Tree Sync

I received the following comment from a reader of my recent post about the new MyHeritage.com Tree Sync feature for LDS users of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. I have responsive comments about this on a number of levels. Here is the comment.

What concerns me is that there is no chance to review what changes MyHeritage is going to make to FamilyTree before the synch happens. The synch is apparently automatic and you only get a report of what was changed after the synch is complete. It seems to me it would be much better to require users to individually approve each change to FT before the synch occurs. I have nightmares of MyHeritage making all kinds of changes to FT, many of which users may not have actually intended to make. Then, it's left up to all us FT users to try and fix the mess.

First of all, the Tree Sync feature is not "automatic" in the sense that it "automatically" copies changes from your MyHeritage.com Tree Sync family tree to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. You have to go to the menu and select the function and then let it run for an hour or so to make any changes. But my response to the comment is not quite that simple. The entire idea of having the ability to synchronize information on two different family trees inplies that they will be kept as close to identicle as possible. Right now, I can manually "sync" any of my online family trees by merely comparing the entries and copying and pasting in any changes. That is exactly the problem being addressed by the idea of creating a way to do this without the work of individually transferring changes.

Even before MyHeritage made their announcement, there are at least three different ways to manually, one by one, make synchronization changes from a third party family tree to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree: Ancestry.com, RootsMagic, and Ancestral Quest. In each of these three programs changes are made essentially one item at a time. By the way, this is a really great feature of all three programs. But what we are talking about here with MyHeritage takes this a giant step further. It allows me to have the same information on my portion of the Family Tree and maintain what is close to a mirror copy (without the reverse effect of a real mirror) on MyHeritage. I now have what is essentially a backup of my work on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree (and everyone else's work too for that matter).

The comment starts out with an inaccurate statement, "What concerns me is that there is no chance to review what changes MyHeritage is going to make to FamilyTree before the synch happens." The only changes made are those you yourself make to your own personal MyHeritage.com family tree. Yes, if I make a stupid mistake on my MyHeritage family tree, I will likely copy that stupid mistake over the FamilySearch Family Tree, but how is this any different than any other mistake I might make while working on the Family Tree? Again, you initiate any synchronization.

I have been working away on my MyHeritage.com Tree Sync family tree for some time now. Guess what? I am finding errors in the Family Tree that need to be corrected. For example, I find a whole ancestral line in England that has non-specific birthplaces for my ancestors. MyHeritage automatically gave me a pile of Record Matches that gave me the specific parishes where these ancestors were born. Rather than manually copying those changes over to the Family Tree, I simply synchronized my portion of the Family Tree and all the changes were made and sources added to support the changes. Wow.

Let's think for a minute about the random changes being made to the Family Tree by people who don't know enough to add sources for their changes or who are simply making mistakes, stupid or otherwise. What do I do when someone changes my entire family line by adding a different parent or some other major change? I have to manually go back and make all the revisions. Now, I have a backup copy of my portion of the Family Tree that helps to keep those random changes under control. I can still use the manual method of making changes if I want to do so but I have a copy to use that is not out of date that can support my corrections to random changes in the Family Tree.

The second statement in the comment also begs the issue. You are the only one adding anything or correcting anything on your MyHeritage family tree. You made all the changes to your MyHeritage family tree, if there is a mistake, correct your own mistake. MyHeritage isn't going to make any changes to your portion of the Family Tree, you are. If you make a mess, it is your own mess not some other user on MyHeritage.

What the commetator is really trying to say is what if one of your relatives has a mess on their MyHeritage.com family tree and uses that to make changes to the Family Tree? Hmm. It seems to me that this is already the case. That is the reason I already get a long list of changes to the people I am watching on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. What the commentator doesn't realize, apparently, is that all my corrections to the Family Tree will be copied over to the relative's MyHeritage.com family tree. Hmm. I just corrected my relative's mistakes. His or her family tree on MyHeritage just got a lot more accurate assuming, of course, that I know what I am doing.

The comment also overlooks the fact that the MyHeritage family trees are subject to an extensive error correcting feature with a consistency checker on multiple levels. I have already had that feature correct several errors in my own MyHeritage family tree. I would suggest that the commentator use the Consistency Checker before synchronizing his own MyHeritage.com family tree efforts.

Now a sense of reality please. The number of people actually working on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and making changes is realtively small. Presently, only about 6% of the members of the Church make any real effort to work on the Family Tree and of those only a vanishingly small percentage have an active family tree on MyHeritage. The effect of this is those without a family tree on MyHeritage are losing out on finding more Record Matches that will help them be even more accurate. I suggest that only really serious genealogists will make the effort to use MyHeritage's family tree and synchronize their changes. By the way, there are a huge number of "serious" genealogists who wouldn't dream of putting their family tree on either website or anywhere else for that matter. But that is another topic for another day.

This is a win/win situation. We all benefit from more accurate entries in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. If you want to know what is happening, I suggest you watch the presentation by Gilad Jephet, the CEO of MyHeritage.com on YouTube. See "Perspectives on Combining Genealogy and Genetics"

If you have any questions about the MyHeritage.com Tree Sync feature or anything else you are worrying about. Please make a comment or contact me directly. You can email me. I am also on Facebook, Google+ and almost everywhere else on the internet.

Claribel and the Mormon Tabernacle Organ

Claribel and the Mormon Tabernacle Organ

This video by The Family History Guide was featured on the Mormon Tabernacle Choir blog in an article entitled, "Meet a Young Descendant of Tabernacle Organ Builder Joseph Ridges."

https://www.mormontabernaclechoir.org/articles/meet-a-young-descendant-of-joseph-ridges.html

This video and others were produced for the recent RootsTech 2018 Conference. You can see the rest of the videos on The Family History Guide YouTube Channel. 

The Harvest is Great: The New MyHeritage Tree Sync with FamilySearch

A short time ago, during RootsTech 2018, MyHeritage.com announced a BETA test of their new Tree Sync program. See "New FamilySearch Tree Sync (beta) allows FamilySearch users to synchronize their family trees with MyHeritage." You can find a link to ask for a code to get a copy downloaded, but you need to signup for MyHeritage and have an LDS account.

I created a new Tree Sync family tree on MyHeritage.com and abandoned my old one. All I can say is "Wow." I already have over 6400 Record Matches for my "new" family tree. I have synchronized the MyHeritage.com family tree with the FamilySearch.org Family Tree one time now and I am working through adding sources to the MyHeritage.com family tree as fast as I can click. I am overwhelmed with the variety of the sources. My wife also set up a Tree Sync family tree and is equally absorbed in gathering new information about her family lines.

Granted, I have been adding sources to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree for a long time and have just about everything I can imagine but I am still making sure the sources are on my MyHeritage.com family tree. Here is a screenshot of a few of the categories of sources I am finding on MyHeritage.

I cannot imagine how much time it would take me to look up all these sources one at a time, even if I could ever imagine doing that. I decided to start adding them into the lines I am currently working on as far as that will go. I will continue working. Basically, I had stopped trying to keep up with MyHeritage because I knew that synchronization was likely coming. Now that it is here, I am very pleased with the opportunity to work all these sources and add them to the Family Tree.

A Family History Mission: A Plethora of Documents

No. 44

Note: You can do a Google search for "A Family History Mission James Tanner" to see all the previous posts in this ongoing series. You can also search for "James Tanner genealogy" and find them.

You would think that after doing genealogical research for about 36 years I would have an appreciation for the number of historical documents there are in the world. But being here and working in the Maryland State Archives digitizing records five days a week creates a whole new perspective on the original documents. I am finally beginning to really understand the immense task of searching records to find our ancestors. We physically handle thousands of documents every week. 

As I have mentioned previously, we are mostly involved with probate documents. These are court documents from the Maryland State Orphan's Court records. Here is a very short explanation of the Orphan's Court from the Maryland Court Website.

The Orphans’ Court is Maryland’s probate court and presides over the administration of estates. In simpler terms, the main job of the Orphans’ Court is to supervise the management of estates of people who have died – with or without a Will – while owning property in their sole name. It has authority to direct the conduct of personal representatives, has jurisdiction over the guardianship of the property of minors and in some counties, appoints guardians of minors.

The functions of the Orphan's Court in Maryland are performed by differently organized and named courts in every other state in the United States. The law governing probates, guardianships, and other related cases also varies considerably from state to state. My law background has helped me analyze and explain some of these records to the other missionaries and volunteers and I also realize how difficult researching in these old records can be for a novice.

While we are digitizing the records, we really don't have to worry about their content. Our main concerns are making acceptable images and managing which records we digitize. But in preparing the documents for digitization, we get into the issues of the content of the documents and have a whole set of challenges. The main challenge is reading the handwriting. Some of the Court Clerks back in the early 1800s had the worst possible handwriting. It helps to have a lot of people, including the volunteers, involved because many of the volunteers have been working with the records for years and recognize names and handwriting because of their experience.

The more I work with the documents, the more I realize their value for finding people. These probate and other related documents are fabulous sources for information about individuals and families. We are often fascinated by the Estate Inventories. We find people with estates valued into the millions of dollars in 1800 dollars. We also find probates of estates where the total inventory of possessions consists of bedding and a few dishes. The total value of these estates is just a few dollars.

One important part of the records are the thousands of enslaved people who are recorded. In addition are all the tragic references to small children being indentured from their families. We have one record of an indenture of a 3-month-old baby.

All in all, this a remarkable experience working with all these records. We do have to wash our hands continually and deal with chapped hands and tired and sore fingers. In working with the books, we have to handle thousands of pages and we actually wear the fingerprints off of our fingers. Why don't we wear gloves? Historically, archivists wore gloves. But the most recent findings indicate that the gloves cause more damage than our bare hands. There is a rather detailed and extensive discussion of the "White Gloves" issue in a blog post entitled, "Misperceptions about White Gloves."

I am grateful for all that I am learning and expect I will learn a lot more.