Medieval Families Unit

Medieval Collections in Community Trees Project

 * Community Trees Project - Wiki page describing the different Medieval collections in the Community Trees database

History of the Medieval Families Unit
The Medieval Families Unit worked in the old Ancestral File (1985-1995) on royalty and nobility to the present and all pre-1500 families, which was an enormous task. The pre-1500 portion alone had approximately 250,000 individuals.

FamilySearch Communities Team
The Medieval Families Unit was closed in 1996 and members of the team were eventually moved to the FamilySearch Communities Team where they are today. They continue to gather information and publish the information into the Community Trees collection found in the Genealogies database on FamilySearch. Individual projects have been added to the Community Trees collection but also can searched all at once. For a list of the Community Trees Projects available and the link to the individual databases, search the Community Trees Project Wiki page.

Source Information
Included in these entries is source information about where the information came from. To find this source information, you must click on the individual's name. Sometimes the information is listed below the vital information.

Information about the Individual Collections
More information about the collection you are viewing is also listed at the top of the individual person's page. Be sure to click on, More... when it appears at the end of the paragraph to find all of the information.

Estimation of Ages in these Databases
The main objective has been to make sure linkage was correct and then as time permitted go back and adjust dates. Many of the dates are not actual birth dates so we used "abt" before them to signify the date when the individual might have been born. If we had an age at an event we used "Cal" for calculated date (example: age 8 in 1208 we would enter "Cal 1200" for the birth date).

The main problem when adjusting "about" dates on one family is that doing so can have a ripple effect that causes other families to have date problems. Most of the people in the Medieval time period did not have an actual birth or death date recorded, only a date when they were mentioned in some kind of document. We use the "abt" date to put individuals in a time period. We know the dates can be way off as generations may be missing or connections may be incorrect. When dealing with large files, "about" dates can be very problematic and at times cannot be resolved.

The team is still working on adjusting the "about" dates. This task will take some time to complete as there are many families and generations that will need to be reviewed.