Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Monday, August 20, 2012

Changes in New.FamilySearch.org overriding those in Family Tree

It appears that by linking FamilySearch.org's Family Tree to New.FamilySearch.org (NFS), that changes made in Family Tree to correct misinformation are quickly negated by careless actions in NFS. Here is part of a comment in the GetSatisfaction.com topic stream in the FamilySearch Help menu:
Just found that a person **with no contact info** combined (for third time) a relative with an unrelated person some 15 years older with different wife, made the older man son of my relative's father AND of his paternal grandfather and reattached wrong wives to both of the latter. Despite there being explanatory "Discussion" notes.
 Here is an excerpt from another comment:
Two days ago I spent two hours on an ancestor who was given two wrong names and married to three wrong husbands with total 17 wrong children. Separated her from the wrong spouses and children, straightened out the name stuff. Yesterday I found she was renamed, again attached to the wrong spouses, her actual spouse was combined with one of his nephews, and there was no "history" showing what I had done the previous day. The changes were made by "anonymous" with a long string of numbers for whom there is no contact information. What data there is suggests that this wrongness was re-migrated into FS-Family Tree yesterday.
My own experience is that inaccurate and duplicative data is still pouring over from NFS to Family Tree. It appears to me that the inaccurate data is being transferred a little at a time, so if you leave your information on Family Tree alone for a few days, you will find additional duplicated information from NFS. Added to this, there are unaccountable changes being made to the NFS data that show up in Family Tree such as changing the spelling of the birth name of an ancestor, contrary to a reference to the actual birth record with the spelling visible to the world.

In fact, the battle has yet to begin. Those changes coming over from NFS are from people who have yet to "discover" Family Tree. When they do, they will undoubtedly carry on their practices of messing up the data, without sources and without a contact email address. Those of us deluged with unbelievably inaccurate information from NFS need to have patience. Family Tree will ultimately win out and we will also win by using the program and correcting all the errors.

1 comment:

  1. That is really too bad that someone over wrote information and messed up data and there is no history of the changes. At www.family-genealogy.com, the program is for individuls andthey can grant access to others to help build a tree. Every transaction is recorded with changes and who did the changes.

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