A Survival Guide to the FamilySearch Family Tree: Part One -- The Introduction

Many of the users of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree feel like they are lost in the wilderness. Some are on the verge of giving up hope and others like one commentator to my recent blog have given up entirely. Here is what she had to say.

I quit using Family Search because changes made with no documentation. And when you asked for it no response.

An additional comment agreed and said:

I totally agree. Aunt Susie said is rarely adequate for making any change in any record. Especially with today's available records, I have also found the Watch feature is not very efficient.

Because of the almost constant stream of such negative comments, I have decided to write a detailed and exhaustive analysis of every comment. If you have any concerns or questions about your own experience with the Family Tree, you can add them as comments and I will respond to every issue raised. I will be using every comment I can find in the extensive comments on the GetSatisfaction.com website. There are about 241 pages of comments. There are apparently about 18,384 "customers" that have made comments on the website.

The biggest challenge I can see starting out is imposing some kind of organization on the comments. Likely, I will be highlighting a few issues at a time and adding issues as the posts continue. If you have been reading my posts on both this blog and on Genealogy's Star, you know I have already spent a great deal of effort answering issues and promoting the Family Tree. I have also done some videos for the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel about the Family Tree and the issues raised. This series of posts will cover some of the same issues but in more depth.

Let's get started.

A Family History Mission: Watching Time Destroy the Records

Messy Book Cover

No. 59

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 or click back through all the posts.

This is the cover to one of the record books from the Maryland State Archives. It is part of the probate records for Harford County, Maryland from the early 1800s. This clerk apparently had a lot of time and not much paper. The inside of this book contains hundreds of probate transactions and records perhaps thousands of the names of the people who lived at that time with other important, genealogically significant information. This particular book came as part of a series of books that took extra care because they were in such poor condition.

From this book cover, you can see that without the efforts of the archivists to save and preserve these court records, much of the information would have been lost. You can also see that without this digitization project, some of the records would soon be lost despite conservation efforts. Here is another example of the condition of some of these books.

Another Messy Book

The challenge of digitizing these books is that turning the pages has to be done very carefully so as to avoid damaging the book further. Here is an example of a book that had water damage that turned into mold damage.

Mold Damage

It is not all bad. Most of the books, even back into the 1700s or early 1800s are in excellent shape. Here is an example of an old book in excellent condition.

When you realize that all this important information has been "locked up" in these books, some for over 200 years, you can begin to understand how important this work is and how much time and effort is involved.

We are glad to serve and have a good time digitizing and prepping the books and records.

Duplicate Photos Flooding FamilySearch Memories

One of the newer features of the FamilySearch.org website is the individualized startup or home page. Some of the things featured are newly posted photos of your (and my) relatives. This newly added photo of my Great-grandmother is a duplicate of a photo that is already on the website. This photo of my ancestor, George Jarvis, outlined in red, has at least eleven copies in the Memories.You can see three of the copies in this screenshot.

You can also see multiple copies of other photos in this same screenshot. Presently, there is no way to edit or remove photos that you, yourself, did not upload to the program. Based on what I see in the Memories photos, very few people check for duplicate images before uploading a photo. Maybe it is time to have a warning or require a check for duplicates warning before uploading anything to the website. Just a thought.

My Mexican Relatives

I got the following surprising notice from FamilySearch.org:

I really did not know I had any relatives in Mexico. This is what I found when I clicked on the link.

The links to individuals is a scrolling set of links so I apparently have a total of 36 "Mexican" relatives. I checked a few and here is my relationship to one of the ones shown above.

As with all these "connection" programs, there is an underlying assumption that the relationships in the Family Tree are correct. Unfortunately, I find that the success average for these connections is quite low. However, it is interesting to know that I have quite a number of possible Mexican relatives. In the case of the relative shown above, there is nothing on his individual entry page showing that he lived in or had any association with Mexico. So before I get all excited about these connections, I would be doing a significant amount of research.

Its All in the Birth Name

This is a common sight in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. It used to be a lot more common, but it is still showing up regularly even after years of cleaning up entries. Ask yourself this question. Was this person actually given all those names at birth? Including a married name? Nice try by the parents for predicting who their daughter would marry. I also like the ones that have the birth name as Mrs. whatever.

Where did these names come from? They are relics of the past. They roughly indicate the number of times this person's name has been submitted to FamilySearch and its predecessors in the past. This long list of "Birth Name" entries graphically illustrates over 100 years of sloppy or incomplete research including typos, deliberate misspellings, and past genealogical standards.

Don't we need to preserve all these variations in the names of our ancestors? No and partially yes. The actual birth name or name found in the earliest record of the person should be what is recorded in the "Vital Information" section. Variations in the name should be recorded as Alternate names or Nicknames. If you click on the Add plus sign shown in the screenshot above, you will have a choice of adding these variations as "Other Information."

If you choose "Alternate Name" you get further choices:

An alternative name should be one that shows up in a specific source document, not just a misspelling or typographical error. Many people changed their names during their lifetime. The rule is that the Vital Information section should reflect the earliest known name. For example, if a person came from Europe and Anglicized their name, the name in the Vital Information section should be the original name from Europe (or other areas of the world) if it is known.

So what do you do with all the duplicate names? You delete them. When you click on the duplicate Birth Name you get the following:

There are options to Edit, Delete or Close.

In some cases, like the one shown above, you see a random name inserted. In this case, there is a birth name of Mrs. Robert Lockwood. There is an entry showing Mary Butler with a second husband named Robert Lockwood but there are no sources showing the children or the second spouse. If a strange or random name shows up, you need to carefully review the Merge History to see if there is a merger of an unrelated person.

Building a Family Tree: An Example on FamilySearch.org -- Project Ten

This post is another in the unending series of Projects I am doing to research different people in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. See the comment at the end of this post for a further explanation of the Projects.

Here is this Project's selection.

If you have read any of the previous Project posts, you will know that this example is consistent with what I have been finding regularly on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. This can almost be reduced to a formula or recipe for fixing the entries. Here we see non-standard entries. In addition, even though this particular entry indicates that there are 11 sources, the family only indicates that there was only one child. This is entirely possible for a variety of reasons including the fact that the mother died in childbirth. The marriage date is interesting because it seems that both the husband and the wife were in their thirties when they got married.

What do I find when I look at the sources?

All of the links to Ancestry.com sources have been added through the Ancetry.com Institutional or Library version so I cannot sign in or view them without going to a Family History Center or library. However, there is a FamilySearch extracted IGI christening record for a James Watson. The problem I see at this point is that the marriage records show a marriage in Westminster, Middlesex and the christening record for the daughter is from Chatham, Kent. Here is the map distance between these two places.

We have to remember that these records are supposed to apply to someone born in the 1700s.

There do not seem to be any duplicates at this point, but I need to do some research about this family. Unfortunately, I immediately find seven or more men named James Watson with marriage records in the same time period in exactly the same parish. This means that I need to start with the daughter, supposedly named Mary Ann Watson. By the way, she is my 5th Great-grandmother.

Clean up time again. But we do jump to having 15 sources attached. There is some inconsistency in the sources with one from Leicester that doesn't seem to belong, but the rest are consistent that this family lived in Chatham, Kent, England. So now, I suspect that we have the wrong James Watson and Ann for the parents of Mary Ann Watson.

Hmm. In a search for "James Watson" in Chatham, Kent, I find 212 results. As I narrow down the search on Findmypast.com by guessing a birth date, I find that there is a James Watson in Medway, Kent who got married in 1747 to one of four women, two of which are named Ann. Not much help at this point. Additional research indicates that there are a large number of men named James Watson and finding one who could have been born in Kent does not produce any possible candidates.

In this case, the solution is to focus on Mary Ann Watson. This Project will have to go into the "long-term" pile of things to do. It is important not to get hung up on researching one person or family that turns into a mess. It is best to spend some time and come back to the research after a while with a fresh look.

Part of doing research is knowing when to stop for a while.

Explanation of how this project began and why I am pursuing it.

In this project, I started out by picking a somewhat random person from my ancestors or my ancestors' descendants who probably lived into the 20th Century from the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and to hopefully show, step-by-step, the research needed to extend that person's family tree back several generations. In this particular case, I found a cousin who lived in the latter half of the 1800s. Finding a person who has no apparent ancestors in the Family Tree is relatively easy for those who lived in or into the 19th Century by much harder the further you go back in the past.  To clarify this project, I will not be reserving any of the people I discover for my own Temple List, unless, as in the case with this family, I am related to those I find. I will simply leave the "green icons" on the Family Tree for that person's descendants to find and use for themselves. Please refrain from doing the temple work for people to whom you are not related.

Now, after I got going doing the research, I got a couple of requests to research some people further back in time. These turned out to be old, established "end-of-line" situations. Since my original idea was to demonstrate finding people, I started with easier challenges. But in any event,  I may or may not find new people to add to the FamilyTree. Since the families I choose are in an "end-of-line" sort of situation independent of the time frame, there is no guarantee that I will be any more successful than the average user of the Family Tree in finding additional family members. In any event, I hope that my efforts as recorded will help either the family members or others to find more information about their ancestral families and relatives.

Why am I doing this? For the past 15 years or so, I have been helping hundreds (thousands?) of people find their ancestors. I simply intend to document the process in detail with real examples so that you can see exactly how I find family lines. I simply want to show where those "green icons" come from. Since the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is entirely cooperative, I will simply assume that when I find a family that needs some research that I am helping that family. By the way, this is Project Five of the series because I intend to do this over and over with different examples.

There is another reason why I am doing this. Because I constantly offer to help people find their ancestors and I get relatively few that take advantage of that offer. I need to spend some of my excess energy.

BYU Family History Library Webinar Series Marches On

While I have been away from the Brigham Young University Family History Library, the volunteers and missionaries at the Library have been presenting and uploading a whole series of valuable videos to the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel. As of the date of this post, the Channel has 6,624 subscribers and 361 videos over 430,000 views. Here are a few of the latest videos.

An Overview of The FH Guide by Wayne Washer

Using Twile.com by Rayanne Melick

Learning to Love Family History...Research! by Kathryn Grant

English Research Finding Ancestors Using FreeReg Parish Registers - Kathryn Grant

I will likely do a series of webinars on my experiences digitizing documents when I get back to Provo. We'll have to see what happens.