An e-mail from my cousin Lamont

In trying to find out where the misinformation about Frances Gates as a spouse of Caroline Gee came from I wrote an e-mail to my cousin Lamont. His father, Lynn, was the premier genealogist of the siblings in his family.

Dear Lamont,

I suppose that you still have your father's genealogy records. Here is a problem that I came upon. Perhaps you could look at the family group sheet that he submitted and see if there is documentation as to where he got the information.

I then attached the e-mail that I sent to Family Search Support.

Here is his reply:

Laurence,

Dad was not very good at documenting his sources. Much of what he got was found at the family history library in Salt Lake and, I think, from various paper records collected from here and there and everywhere.
There isn't any way for me to backtrack to a source. So, if you are confident of your information then, by all means, make the corrections as you deem appropriate.

LaMont

Comment:
Historically there were two separate calls for members of the church to submit four generations of family group sheets to the church. This was called the four generation program. Thousands of sheets were submitted and collected and organized by surname in binders and were available to members of the church. When I saw the collection it was on the East wing of the second floor of the Joseph Smith Memorial building.

Volunteers took those records and entered each sheet into a computer database. This became known as the Ancestral File. It was not uncommon for people to copy the sheets and make that part of their personal database. There was little data quality control of the submitted sheets. Thus if the data was entered onto a sheet, it was considered correct. There was quality control of the data entered into the computer by the volunteers, but no checking of sources. Thus if someone submitted a sheet with erroneous information it would be perpetuated in private databases from the submitted sheets or from information from the Ancestral file.

A good example of this is the birth place of Lysander Gee. He was born in Austinburg, Ashtabula, Ohio but if you look in New Family Search and some of the records in Ancestral file you will find a birth place of Hanover, New York. Thus when these computer databases were combined to produce New Family Search all of these records were merged into one individual record perpetuating the misinformation.

Another case was that of Stephen Gee, the son of Solomon Gee, who was listed both as a male and a female. After submitting proof of his maleness, NFS wrote the following:
Dear Ivin Laurence Gee,
Re: Stephen Gee- PID (L7ZP-M7M)
Because the record with the incorrect gender was submitted by one individual, the record for Stephen Gee showing the wrong gender no longer appears in new Family Search. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.
Sincerely,
FamilySearch Data Administration

It takes a lot less time to submit the correct information than it does to change it once it is in the NFS database.

I believe it is our generation's responsibility to correct the records to reflect the true information. This will take patience, persistence and long-suffering on our part, but we now have many of the tools necessary to obtain the correct information.