Commmunity Trees Project adds Utah Collection

In a blog post on Beta.FamilySearch.org WoodburyKA posted an announcement of the addition of a Utah Collection to the Community Trees Project. The announcement reads as follows:

If you have ancestors who lived in Utah, you may want to check out the newest addition to FamilySearch's Community Trees project. The Early Utah Community Trees contains 1.7 million individuals and 568,000 marriages that are all lineage-linked. This database was created from the following sources:

• Utah Births and Christenings, 1892 to 1941
• Utah Deaths and Burials, 1880s to 1946
• Utah Marriages, 1887 to 1966
• Utah Death Certificates, 1904 to 1956
• Utah Salt Lake County Deaths, 1908 to 1949
• Veterans with Federal Service Buried in Utah, Territorial to 1966
• Utah 1850 US Census, Mortality Schedule
• Utah 1850 US Census, Slave Schedule
• Utah 1850 US Census
• Utah 1860 US Census
• Utah 1870 US Census
• Utah 1880 US Census
• Utah 1900 US Census
• Utah 1920 US Census

Future work on this collection will include:

• Efforts to clean up and better represent the sources that are listed
• Using enhanced versions of the Utah 1850, 1860, and 1870 US Census data
• Adding in the Utah 1910 and 1930 US Census data

The Community Trees project also contains lineage-linked databases from many countries around the world, including the British Isles, Australia, India, the Pacific Isles, and Peru. Check it out at http://histfam.familysearch.org and give us your feedback!

 Community Trees are lineage-linked genealogies from specific time periods and geographic localities around the world. The information also includes the supporting sources. Most of the genealogies are joint projects between FamilySearch and others who live locally or have expertise in the area or records used to create the genealogies. Each Community Tree is a searchable database with views of individuals, families, ancestors and descendants, as well as printing options. See FamilySearch Community Trees.

Previously, I had no way to determine the accuracy or completeness of the trees, since I was not familiar enough with any of the locations covered by the collections. However, I am very familiar with Utah records and have any number of relatives I can search in the database. In my first tests of the database, I can only hope that the other collections are more accurate and complete than the Utah records turned out to be. I searched for my Great-great-grandfather, Sidney Tanner. Sidney was a well known resident of Beaver City, Beaver, Utah (Beaver is both the name of the town and the county). He had four wives, Julia Ann Shepherd, Louisa Conlee (or Coulee), Rachel Neyman and Mary Ann Nickerson. He was born 1 Apr 1809 in Greenwich, Washington, New York. None of this is in any difficult to substantiate and there are many references to him in Utah history, including a number of newspaper articles. He died in Beaver City, Beaver, Utah on 5 Dec 1895.

OK, so what does the Community Trees have about Sidney? Not much really. Here is the results of a search for Sidney. It turns out that all three of the "Sidney Tanner" hits are the same person. The first one has the following information:

Not very helpful, (click on the image to see a larger version) gender unknown, wrong birth place twice, wife's name not complete, not all of his children are listed, not all of his wives are listed. Although his father, John Tanner, is in the database, clicking on Sidney's ancestors doesn't show that relationship. Sidney had 22 children, only four of them are shown. So what am I to think? Maybe helpful to suggest some sources, but not too useful for accuracy and completeness. Hopefully, suggestions will be made that will correct and amplify the database. (The moral of this story is don't believe everything you read or see, especially if it a user submitted family group record).