What are the "changes" being made to the FamilySearch.org Family Tree?

 

If you are working consistently on maintaining your part of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, you probably know that you can "follow" (previously watch) people you are interested in preserving. Because the Family Tree is entirely user driven and by its nature cooperative, any of your relatives could add content, change content, or delete content in any given week. If you click on the star located on an individual ancestor's startup page, you will start receiving a notification email of all the changes made to the people you follow on a weekly basis directly from FamilySearch. The image above is an example of part of the list for one week. 

The changes fall into distinct categories and not all of them a bad or unwanted. However, some of them are merely like weeds in a garden; unwanted and bothersome. You only have to react to those changes that affect the accuracy of the Family Tree entries. Here are some examples of the types of changes you might run into.

1. A change to a revolving door ancestor from either adding incorrect information or correcting the bad information added. Here is a screenshot of one from a current week. 

I have cropped this image so you cannot see the person who made the change. When you receive the list, the information on the list includes a like to the person making the change. You can then send that person a message directly through the FamilySearch website or you can send an email message if the person has made his or her email available. 

Esther Brownell LWQZ-G2B is someone who is in my direct line to Mayflower passengers. She is commonly changed by people who have no idea about the existence of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants research in what are called the Silver Books. In this particular week there were seven changes made to Esther Brownell. In this case, someone tried to add another husband with the same name and the person making the change shown above corrected the entry. There was nothing I needed to do because the person making the final change was known to me to be reliable. The person who corrected the entry merged the duplicate husband. 

You can decide if you want to participate in the constant flow of changes for this type of person or not. If you do, I suggest you take some time to become completely familiar with all the listed sources and any issues that might still be residual in nature. Do not make a change unless you absolutely know what you are doing. Bear in mind that with people in this capacity, there are sources that disagree. 

There were several other weekly changes to other people in this revolving door category. I am not presently working on maintaining any of them. If I am concerned about the changes being made, I keep a complete copy of all the sources and information on Ancestry.com and I can then have an almost instant reference point for correcting an inaccurate entry. 

2. People with good intentions tidying up the entries. 

I have to admit that these people are helping in some instances as long as they don't delete any useful information or detach sources. They could better spend their time actually doing research however. 

3. Sources attached. 

This is a good thing except for the sources that aren't really sources such as a citation to another Ancestry family tree. I mostly ignore these unless I am involved in doing research about the family. 

4. Actually adding incorrect information without a supporting source. 

This is really less common than any of the other change issue. Here is an example with the response made. 

This is the response. You can see the details of the change by clicking on the name of the person being changed and then going to see all the changes being made. Here someone added a father to one of my ancestors without adding a substantiating source citation. The newly added father was simply removed by someone who knew what was going on. Again, there was nothing I needed to do because the correction was made by someone else who was watching with the correct response. 

There are probably some variations on these basic types of changes but all of them can be resolved as long as you do your research and separately maintain a list of sources. There is absolutely no reason to look at all changes as bad. Granted, there is a lot of misinformation and sloppy research out there, but overall the Family Tree is becoming more accurate all the time.