Saturday, March 9, 2013

The Committee Tree at Family Search


"A mule is a horse designed by a committee." The Family Search tree is a tree designed by a committee. It is a little awkward, like the mule too. One of my Facebook friends posted a link to the fancreate web page . It draws the information needed for creating the Fan Chart (see above) from your Family Search tree. When I created a chart from my Family Search shared tree (shared meaning it can be edited and changed by anyone) I found quite a few wrong family connections on the chart.
On the upside someone added to one of my lines and this addition may actually be correct!! I will check the tree at Family Search more often for possible extensions of some of my lines.
The new line I found seems plausible so I decided to leave it as it is on the chart. I had seen a number of trees state that Nathan Browning's mother was Rebecca Unknown. It appears her maiden name was McKaughan. Her mother's name was Boyd. It's interesting that I matched several people who had Boyds in their family tree at FT DNA.
Some paperwork was generated by descendants of the family who were looking to inherit money from an ancestor who owned a glass factory in Belfast. An 1873 statement by a family member, Joab Brooks, gave some interesting details about the early family.
For some reason all of the corrections I made at Family Search never showed up on the charts I created. Some of my corrections would show up, but others remained uncorrected. I decided to just cross then out. One of these stubborn errors was the parentage of Andrew Forgey Sr.. His parents were given as Hugh Forgey and Sally Everman. Hugh Forgey was born about 1754 and his supposed son was born in 1732. Don't now how they became linked this way?
Another error occurred when Jesse McPike was entered as father of William McPike when Jesse was actually his grandson.
This 9 generation chart provides such a nice view of where my Family Search tree stands. I hear that many people aren't interested in charts, but I don't think you can know where you stand without them? I am finding the disinterest in this aspect of genealogy is leading to oddly formatted entries. You don't hear many people discussing how to properly enter names. I am finding entries like John Sr. Browning, instead of John Browning Sr.. When a mother or wife's name is missing I find, for instance, Mrs. Samuel Hicks entered when I think the space should be left blank.
I still have to verify some of the information I've found on the Family Search tree. These kinds of collaborative trees can be useful, as long as you verify the information using original documents.

2 comments:

Nan Harvey said...

My Eleanor/Ellen Forgey's father is listed as "J. Forgery". Are you working on Archibald Forgey at all? If so, I'll stay away from it for a while. My Harvey line has the old, old information and is completely wrong. Elizabeth Rogers is still Rachel Elizabeth Rogers with wrong parents. I keep finding multiple duplicates of people, sometimes they show up and sometimes they don't. How will we ever get it all fixed?

Annette said...

The tree at Family Search is too hard to correct. I hope they make some changes so the wrong info can be deleted permanently. It's really such a tangle it gives me a headache everytime I work on that tree. I think I tried to add Archibald as a child of Hugh and Catherine but couldn't. I might be able to now that the format has changed some. I'll try again.