What are revolving door ancestors and why do they exist?

 

A revolving door ancestor is a FamilySearch.org Family Tree person who has a consistently high number of changes over a long period of time. The image above is one of my border-line revolving door ancestors. This particular person has 269 all-time changes that include adding the initial information, sources, and subsequent corrections, additions and deletions. A true revolving door ancestor would have that many changes in a week. Almost all real revolving door ancestors date back into the 1700 or earlier. 

You don't want to confuse a person, such as your grandmother, who has changes to disputed or incomplete information with someone who is a real revolving door ancestor. If someone is changing or deleting information about a near family member, this is usually due to a lack of communication or insanity. It is also usually just one or two people who insist on changing source supported information with drivel. Revolving door ancestors can have dozens or even hundreds of people adding and changing information and the same person rarely is involved in changing sourced information more than once. Of course, there are are alway exceptions.

 The main source of all this "bad" information is the gigantic pool of Personal Ancestral File (PAF) and GEDCOM files that are all unsourced by the limitations of the program. There is also a segment of changes that come from people believing unsourced information in family surname or descendancy books. People tend to think that if it came from a grandmother or other relative or from a book that the information has been checked and is correct. There is also a small number of people who think that FamilySearch checks all the information in all the entries and so if you go in and make changes to an entry that says it was submitted by FamilySearch the correction can't be correct. If an entry or change shows that it was made my FamilySearch, all that means is that the program copied the information from the Ancestral File, International Genealogical Index, or some other user contributed database. 

It does absolutely no good to get mad, frustrated, or combative about changes made to the Family Tree. There are tactics that minimize and in some cases eliminate the inaccurate changes. There are a number of videos about how to fix problems, react to changes, and other subjects on the Brigham Young University Family History Library YouTube Channel. This is an older video but still is a good place to start. 

Handling the changes made to the FamilySearch Family Tree?