Escaping the Fire Swamp of genealogical research

 

Excuse the reference to Princess Bride, but there are only a few terms that adequately describe the difficulties of trying to unravel a mess in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. This particular mess started with a family where the husband had three listed wives. Unfortunately, the three wives shared all or some of the same children. This is not an isolated or even uncommon issue with research done by several people over many years. This family was located in England and when the marriage dates and other information, including census records was examined, it was obvious that all three of the women could not be the man's wives or the mothers of the listed children. It turned out that there were two separate men and that one of them had been married to two of the wives, one after another and the third wife was married to another man with the same name who lived in the same area. 

The problem with the wives probably came about as a result of the very common same name = same person issue. In the situation above, the key to unraveling the confusion was to focus on the occupations listed in the English census records. One of the men was a pipe fitter and the other was a carpenter. The census records were also the key to separating out which children belonged to which wife. 

One of the areas most prone to tangles is New England (British Colonies) before 1800. I don't usually find this problem with English records because the records generally contain enough information from parish registers to separate families when the focus is on the location of events in the people's lives. In New England, the really helpful records are seldom indexed, and the confusion is endemic. In the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, the issues of tangled families are compounded by would-be genealogists copying old family group records and GEDCOM files thereby creating sometimes dozens of duplicates. By far, the largest number of continual changes come from entries that lack any source references. 

Here is an example of some of the changes for one individual with the names of the contributors removed. 

Multiply these changes by about a million, and you will have some idea of what the general swamp in this part of the Family Tree looks like. However, these issues are not confined to FamilySearch. One challenge I had with working out the multiple wives problem on Ancestry was that the Record Hints (Green Leaves) kept mixing the three families together. The Record Hints are helpful, but caution is imperitive. 

I suggest that when you find yourself in a tangled mess on any of the large family tree websites you retreat and leave the mess to those who actually do research and rely on valid sources. If you want to get into the middle of one of these messes, you can find them more easily now on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree because of a new notice that can be posted. Here is an example. 

The presence of this message is an alert that you are entering the fire swamp and need to exercise extreme caution. You are likely to have an immediate and detailed response to any, and I mean any, changes that are not supported by contemporary, valid, historical source citations. 

Thanks to Family Search for this very small step towards drying up the swamp.