Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
I am an only child. And I am not married.
Why does this matter? It has forced me to be completely self-sufficient, having no siblings or spouse or children to rely on. I do not delegate or collaborate well. Ask my co-workers!
As a genealogist, I find that I do not trust the research of others, so I stick to only what I have found myself. That’s partly because that I do not know anyone in the immediate area who is also working on the same ancestors as I am. My relatives, rightly so, are happy to see the results of my research without having to duplicate it for themselves. I am a consistent non-collaborator.
In many previous columns, I have mentioned the most collaborative project in the history of genealogy, which is the FamilySearch Family Tree. Today, the least-collaborative person I know, namely me, is going to explain the most-collaborative genealogy project of all time.
I will give you a little background on how this started. In the old days (and for web sites the old days are the 1990s) the early genealogy web sites allowed for collaboration by allowing us to upload our trees to their site, and allowing paid members of the site to search those trees for possible hints and more relatives we did not have yet. This was a great way of finding fellow researchers from around the nation and the world and work with them on the same family, but this method had a number of noticeable flaws:
- Once you uploaded your tree to the site, it was frozen in time. If you made an update to your local copy of the tree, it did not automatically update the web site copy. (This is still mostly true, depending on what software you use.)
- More than one person could have an uploaded tree containing the same people, and the date for those people might be different. Which one do you trust? There was no place to mark your data with the source you used to find it.
- Frankly, the data on the uploaded trees is only as good as the researcher.
We lived with those limitations for a long time, and we might have complained about them to each other, but it took our friends at FamilySearch to hear the chorus of complaints and do something about it, and thus they created the FamilySearch Family Tree. I’ll call it “The Tree” for short.
When you upload your tree to FamilySearch, the first thing it does is to check everyone in your tree against everyone else in The Tree, looking for possible duplicates. Depending on the data in each record, it recommends that the two duplicates should be merged together into one record, or they ought to stay separate. For example, if The Tree has Lon Chaney Sr. (Phantom of the Opera, 1883-1930) and a person uploads a tree with Lon Chaney Jr. (Wolfman, 1906-1973), even though both names are the same, the dates are too far apart to suggest a merge. If your tree has Anthony Dominick Benedetto 8/3/1926-7/21/2023 and “The Tree” has Tony Bennett with the same dates, then you have the same person of course but need to set up Tony Bennett as the “alternate name” because it wasn’t his name at birth. I’m not even sure if FamilySearch would presume to ask for a merge since the names are so different. Sadly I do not know the inner algorithm or I could explain it.
FamilySearch brings up each one on your screen, asking if the Giovannangelo Olivo in your tree is the same as the one already in The Tree. It shows you the birth date, birth place, death date and place, spouse, children etc and asks you to compare them. The dates may be missing or very different, however both Giovannagelo Olivos have the same spouse name and several kids that match up. Maybe The Tree has more info that you do, and maybe you have more, or they are very similar or exactly the same. So instead of 12 different researchers with 12 different versions of Giovannangelo Olivo, the objective is to have one of each with everything.
Next, how can we trust that the information for Giovannagelo Olivo in The Tree is correct? FamilySearch allows you to show us that the data is correct by allowing two different methods. Method one is to allow us to type free-form text explaining why we think this data is correct. For example, my grand-aunt passed away a few years ago. I have her death date and place of death, because I asked the relatives who were with her when she passed away. Even though there is no document on FamilySearch that can be the source for her death information at this time, my explanation can tell other researchers that they can decide whether to trust me based on what I said. If my reasoning was flawed or vague, they could decide that I might be wrong.
When a user finds two different records in The Tree for the same person, they can choose to “Merge” the two records into one. When the user merges two records together, they have the chance to explain why they are right and The Tree is wrong regarding one piece of data. If The Tree happens to be right, then the reason remains the final word until a new one shows up.
Does this sound like “whoever is the last person to make a change ends up with the final word?” Yes it certainly does. This system does rely on the honesty and integrity of the researchers who upload their trees and merge their info with The Tree. Unfortunately there is no mechanism to confirm that the latest reason and the latest piece of data is better or worse than the one it is replacing.
You can also look for people in The Tree and find that your grand-aunt is in The Tree as the daughter of her parents, and her husband is in The Tree as the son of his parents, but for some reason, no one merged them as husband and wife. When you see such an omission, you can link parents to their children, and spouses to each other, while working in The Tree. Once you link a husband and wife, you can add their children and grandchildren etc.
(One small point to mention at this juncture. The Tree is supposed to only show other researchers people who are deceased. You can enter living people in The Tree including yourself, but only your FamilySearch login is allowed to see them. They do not want people searching The Tree for living people and then using the genealogical data for criminal purposes.)
There is another method to mark data besides typing a paragraph explaining why. While searching FamilySearch records, you might find the birth certificate for a relative who is now deceased. You can click a button to attach that source to a person, and the birth date and birth place for that person. Later on, when you search The Tree and find the right person, you can look at the actual document that is the source for information, without having to go search for it separately.
Keep in mind that not every source is a document that FamilySearch has available. If you sent to Cook County for a death certificate, or if you went to a library out of state to find a document, you still have to explain your source in the paragraph, because you cannot attach it from a FamilySearch record directly to a person in The Tree. You have the alternative of scanning the paper document and adding it to “Memories” and attaching it to the person in The Tree that way. Then you tell us in the “Reason this data is correct” paragraph that we can see the document in the Memories.
This is a lot of explanation for information, and there is still the element of trust, or lack thereof. You should reach out to other researchers for many reasons. There may be several people who have contributed to one person’s data, and if they care enough about that person to enter data for them, they may have common ancestors for you to discuss with each other. Each piece of data is connected to the researcher who entered it, so you can click on that person’s FamilySearch id, and you can either start a chat session if they are on-line, or send them a note on FamilySearch to ask a question. Frankly this is a section of FamilySearch that needs to be promoted. Many users do a lot of entry in The Tree but do not seem to answer their notes.
You may notice that a piece of data comes from a user called “FamilySearch” or “GEDCOM data”. These are generic user names for data that came from AI searches of records. No person was involved. The data may be spelled wrong due to AI not reading it correctly, or it may be old GEDCOM files from data that pre-dates a lot of FamilySearch sources. Some of my tree is on The Tree from 2012. I have had to correct my own data!
As usual, my column has pros and cons.
Pro – there are endless millions of records on The Tree and you will be surprised how quickly you can find records to check for yourself and update your local tree, or someone who could be a good research contact.
Con – there are no qualifications to adding or changing data on The Tree. A person who just started their research can change data overriding a 30 year veteran. This has happened to me too many times, and I have not uploaded very much to The Tree.
The FamilySearch team leaders are aware of the flaws with their site. They would have to test our genealogy skills and grade us on our prowess, and then it would take a major effort for a level 2 genealogist to override a level 5. They implore people not to merge unless they have a very good reason. Just finding two Vito Russos married to two Maria Bianchis doesn’t mean they are the same two people. Thanks to Italians naming their children after grandparents, it is easy to merge people together who shouldn’t be. A new researcher who does not yet understand that parents name multiple children the same first name when the older children have died, might just merge these children together because they have the same parents and were born in the same town.
Being the non-collaborative type (which admittedly I need to work on) I have only recently begun checking for families in The Tree and adding ancestors. I have far too much data to just dump it all in The Tree and wait for the changes from other people to come flooding in. When I am retired, I can spend some time every day debating with other researchers why my data is more correct. Or maybe it isn’t…..
I intend to write another column for next month showing you some of the features of The Tree, such as how to search it and adding data and perhaps even merging. In the meantime, you can go to “Search”, and “Family Tree” and look for people just to see what’s what, until next month.
