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I have kept a pretty extensive tree on here because it's free and I started on here before going to Ancestry.
So a few months ago, someone changed all my Eatons to Eson, a name not familiar to me at all. It brought on a whole bunch of strange names, none of which were my family. This also wiped out all the branches of the extended family too.
I changed it all back but yesterday I saw the same Eson family segments on my tree again. And the name of the person doing this, was also on line right then. I emailed the person several times, asking them to stop. There were no resources listed for this Eson. I then complained to Familysearch and got a response that this is a public website and ANYONE can visit, change or add to it. I asked if I could block people from making changes to my tree, and did not get an answer. Apparently the mysterious poster is a Family search rep and he told me to put it back the way I wanted it, adding resources. I was furious since this is alot of work, and I did not appreciate his interference.
Just so you know, this can happen so be on the look out for strangers on your tree !
I don't bother with FSFT anymore. Too many narcissists merging and stealing what you took the time to upload. Luckily I only uploaded about 50 people only to go back a week later and seeing someone else's name under every entree. Scr*w that BS!
I don't bother with FSFT anymore. Too many narcissists merging and stealing what you took the time to upload. Luckily I only uploaded about 50 people only to go back a week later and seeing someone else's name under every entree. Scr*w that BS!
Your username is likely still in the list of edits, but if someone else edited those entries more recently, it might list their name first. It's called collaboration. There are downsides to that, and again, I don't recommend keeping your main/working tree on a collaborative tree, but it can also be beneficial to work with others who are working on the same ancestors.
BTW, when I did my own tree I have used the different spellings going back in time when it came from a reliable source.
Schools coerced spellings.
A spoke with a great aunt about a month ago over her names. Her and her older brother spell their name "Eidson," but her younger siblings spell it "Edison" because the teachers forced them to do that. The teachers told them the "correct" way to spell their name, and if they wrote it as it should be, the teachers would punish them. According to her, her father went to the school, but school administrators refused to budge. That was par for the course in the 1920s and 1930s.
I have another interesting situation.
Husband and wife buried separately in different States. His headstone says "Dodson" and hers says "Dotson."
That they were married is not a question of fact, because there's plenty of documentation for it, and they both died on the same day. I have the newspaper article for the traffic accident on I-75 about an hour and half south of Toledo, Ohio that killed them and orphaned their four children who were uninjured in the accident.
I've investigated a number of traffic accidents in my day, and according the newspaper article, the car tore up 186' of guard-rail and still had sufficient momentum to roll several times down an embankment.
That tells me the car was traveling in excess of 75 MPH.
I'm wondering if her family wasn't extremely angry and blames him for the accident, which might be why they're buried separately.
I doubt that it's narcissism. I'm probably one of those people that you hate. If something can be correctly merged, you uploaded/created it wrong and made a mess. There shouldn't be duplicates. In general, people shouldn't upload anything but rather create individuals one at a time or risk creating duplicates that then need to be cleaned up. I wish FS would eliminate the upload option entirely.
One reason for seeing corrections on every entry is "standardized" dates/places. If you don't see the little icon indicating standardization on your locations then it's not entered "correctly". Sometimes standardization is not possible but too many people rely upon the mechanism that FS uses to "guess" a standardized entry from your entry. The problem with this mechanism is that the original entry is used in any downloads and not the standardized entry. So, you might see a lot of entries which look the same as you entered them but are now selected from the internal list and are standardized.
With respect to "stealing", the idea of a public tree is that you are "sharing" information for everybody to use. You WANT people to have access to this information. I can see people getting upset if changes are getting made which appear to be wrong. Here's an example: somebody grabs a birth date from a tombstone and corrects an entry on the site. Let's say that date is 4/5/1871. The death record shows 4/3/1871. An 1870 census record shows the individual alive on the 1870 census as an infant and the 1900 census shows a 4/1870 birth date. So, what entry is correct? You can be pretty sure that the correct year is 1870 even though the official records indicate something to the contrary. Who gets to make the call on what the actual date should be?
Or how about this situation -- you have a surname which is Conkey on most records but is Conky on others and one branch of the family in one area of the country standardized on one variant and a different branch standardized on the other. Who gets to make the determination on when the convergence point is if the records are varying for a couple generations? The point being is that there can be a lot of gray areas.
If you want complete control, use your own genealogy software and create private trees. I think FS is the best option for a one tree collaborative option though. Just try to be a bit more understanding when mistakes get made. I might do a hundred merges perfectly and then totally screw one up and either not realize it or am not able to totally correct the mistake. Mistakes are going to happen on public trees but I think the benefits outweigh the deficits.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Roder51
I don't bother with FSFT anymore. Too many narcissists merging and stealing what you took the time to upload. Luckily I only uploaded about 50 people only to go back a week later and seeing someone else's name under every entree. Scr*w that BS!
I doubt that it's narcissism. I'm probably one of those people that you hate. If something can be correctly merged, you uploaded/created it wrong and made a mess. There shouldn't be duplicates. In general, people shouldn't upload anything but rather create individuals one at a time or risk creating duplicates that then need to be cleaned up. I wish FS would eliminate the upload option entirely.
Yeah, but then people add less data. I don't want to upload my whole gedcom because it has over 16,000 people in it and will likely create a lot of duplicates, but equally, I'm not going to add all that manually as it would be too time consuming. So instead, I haven't done either and simply have no tree data at FS.
Luckily haven't had too many issues on Family Search. I uploaded a Gedcom there about 5-8 years ago (can't remember). Only issue is one of my ancestors (3rd great grandmother) was a slave of a family in TN. She had 4 sons by her white enslaver and they were listed in his household in 1870 - her and the 4 children. There is a published family history of this particular family in which it acknowledges that one of the white male enslavers had 4 mullatto children by his slave and they name my 3rd great grandmother.
Fast forward on Family Search, this family is listed. They didn't initially have my 3rd great grandmother attached to that family but in the past 3 years someone attached my 3rd great grandmother as the white enslavers wife/mate. That's fine by me since she did have children by him. However, recently a user has been attaching the white children of this enslaver to my 3rd great grandmother. I removed them (because I have her on "watch") and I told him that this was my direct ancestor and that she did not have any children by the enslaver after 1870. She married my 3rd great grandfather in 1872 and moved away from that household. He said okay and explained he was a direct male descendant of this enslaver. I said that's fine but don't add children to my own that don't belong to her and I told him I don't research the white family makeup as I only review their information regarding their slaves. Six months ago same person added them back. I removed them and sent another message. Three months ago he added them again and put a note about how my 3rd great grandmother was a "maid" of the household and a "wife" of this man. So being facetious I put a note/discussion stating that she was his slave (in capital letters lol) and that this man owned ____ many slaves and unfortunately he had 4 children with my 3rd great grandmother who had no right to refuse sexual advances because she was a slave so rape may have been involved (I was very upset and I have since changed the note lol). I also sent a message to the user and told him I would report him if he kept changing my great grandmother's information as it was the 3rd time he had done so and I am a direct descendant of this woman and even have pictures of some of those children listed on the 1870 census that I've identified. He said he'd never do it again. We shall see.
Good call on not doing the upload. My tree has even more people than yours and I created people individually. I didn't have to do very many entries before hitting work that was already done. Unless your family is very unique, that should be the case. For living people, you can upload to your hearts content since the tree is private for them.
I found it satisfying to enter work that had not been done before and was excited to find stuff that was done. My experience was the opposite of that when using non-public trees since discovery of new stuff typically meant having to enter a lot of data manually into my own software.
At some point, you're going to want to share all of that work or wonder why you spent all of the time doing it if it's not going to be preserved.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PA2UK
Yeah, but then people add less data. I don't want to upload my whole gedcom because it has over 16,000 people in it and will likely create a lot of duplicates, but equally, I'm not going to add all that manually as it would be too time consuming. So instead, I haven't done either and simply have no tree data at FS.
Good call on not doing the upload. My tree has even more people than yours and I created people individually. I didn't have to do very many entries before hitting work that was already done. Unless your family is very unique, that should be the case. For living people, you can upload to your hearts content since the tree is private for them.
I found it satisfying to enter work that had not been done before and was excited to find stuff that was done. My experience was the opposite of that when using non-public trees since discovery of new stuff typically meant having to enter a lot of data manually into my own software.
At some point, you're going to want to share all of that work or wonder why you spent all of the time doing it if it's not going to be preserved.
There are some branches that are already well researched and probably on FS, but equally, some of them are not. My work is on Ancestry.com so it's not like I'm not sharing it. On the contrary, I feel like what is the point of spending all that time adding it to FS when it's already on Ancestry.com and at FS, someone might come along and mess it up? Not saying I'll never do it, but every time I think about it, I feel like I'd rather spend my time working on my tree rather than copying it to another site.
I've just realized that a lot of the duplicates at FS's tree are created by FamilySearch's autobot which seems to add data from their records. The bot is not smart enough to recognize duplicates/families though, so if it adds people to the tree from 10 baptism records, for example, all children of the same parents, it will add 10 new families, creating 10 duplicate sets of the same parents, each with only one child.
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