Genealogy from the perspective of a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon, LDS)

Friday, October 27, 2017

Royalty in the FamilySearch Family Tree


From time to time, I have written about the phenomenon of those who trace their ancestry "back to Adam." As I have also noted, these fanciful genealogies are abundantly represented in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree.  Here is a screenshot of the person page for one of the many copies of "Adam" in the Family Tree.


Here are the data problems.


Hmm. Looks like I have my work cut out for me in correcting these entries. Oh dear, they are Read Only. But I guess my question is why are they here at all?

As interesting as the multiple entries from Adam and Eve are to all of us, we have an even more pervasive problem: The Royal Lines in the Family Tree.

As the screenshot at the top of this post shows as an example, Isabella de Taillefer d'Angouleme Queen of England supposedly had 127 children with 14 husbands. Hmm. This makes Adam look like a minor problem in the Family Tree. Here is an example of Isabella's profligacy with one of her husbands:


Unfortunately, without scrolling, these screenshots do not do justice to the entries.

This is not an isolated instance of excess. There are actually people spending time on these entries and adding more information. Rather than embarrass some user, I would simply note that there were twelve changes made to this person, yesterday, the 26th of October, 2017 adding even more information.

The irony of this all is that I was contacted yesterday from a potential patron at the BYU Family History Library that wanted information about researching royal lines in Europe. What am I supposed to say to this person?

Here is the kind of entry we are up against. This example is from FindAGrave.com given as a record hint to Henry III, Plantagenet.


Hmm again. This entry seems to lead some credence to the whole issue. But here is what is in the Family Tree for poor dead Henry III.


He is apparently buried in two different places? By the way, according to the Family Tree, Henry III only had eight wives and 22 children. With all these children, no wonder why so many people are related to royalty. Now, don't get me wrong. I realize that kings and queens had children and that someone has to be related to them. But are you really going to claim you are a descendant of these messed up royal lines?

By the way, Henry III has only 58 possible duplicates that show in the Family Tree.


Which of these 58 duplicates is your ancestor? Further, the entry is "Read Only" and cannot be changed.

By the way, Henry III is buried in Westminster Abbey.

I really don't have any suggestions for a solution to this problem, but it would be a start to try to prune off all this mess and keep a closer watch on the royalty that does really exist. How about not allowing any entries before 1500 without review for a start?

2 comments:

  1. re. " How about not allowing any entries before 1500 without review for a start?"
    Yes, yes, yes!

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  2. It is hard to know who one would appeal to to have your request granted. The programming engineers do not tackle any thing like this, although they have the know how to do so. And those with the proper authority to make these kinds of decisions, I feel, don't really know enough about the Family Tree pedigree to know what a mess it is in places. So ... we just carry on, like pioneers!

    ReplyDelete