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Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Choosing Family Search Family Tree by James Tanner

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James Tanner has written a fantastic blog post today.  Check it out right here:

http://tinyurl.com/ybzw8nvk

'There is only one major objection to using the FamilySearch.org Family Tree: the ability of people to change the information. All of my writing and talking about the subject does not seem to make the slightest dent in the accumulated ire generated by having "your" information changed by someone who had no idea what they were doing, did not provide a source or violated one of your cherished traditional stories. I recently spent about an hour explaining my position on this issue in a video on the BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel. 


I have recently received several comments from people who state that they will not use the Family Tree because of the "changes." In an attempt to provide yet another answer to these complaints, I have been thinking about the core reasons why the Family Tree exists and should be a choice for storing all of your genealogical data. I believe the most important of the reasons I came up with is the need to avoid duplication of effort. 


If you were to spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years doing research about your ancestors, how would you like to find out that someone had already done all that same research that included a source citation for every single person, event, and place recorded? That is not a hypothetical situation. It has been the reality for genealogical research for more than a hundred years. By refusing to use the Family Tree, you are, in effect, putting your research in danger of being nothing more than a duplication of work that may have been done previously. Changes to your data on the Family Tree is a really small price to pay for avoiding duplication of effort."
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Although there is of course always a choice to be made and pros and cons either way, but i think James makes a compelling case for why one might want to consider FS/FT. 

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