1. They take any information that is submitted, but it's not automatically merged into a single 'correct' version. The system keeps track of the original submi

1. They take any information that is submitted, but it's not automatically merged into a single 'correct' version. The system keeps track of the original submissions and what the sources are, including reference information, source images, etc. if they are submitted. You can merge records together into a single individual, but that individual can be split again. As you might expect, there are some family trees where people are constantly fighting over the actual events. It's a bit like wikipedia in that way. 2. Yes, they allow very free-form data in the tree. In previous incarnations they used to try to merge everything together into a single 'true' version of events. Since they now just keep everything, they will try to provide a coherent view of the data, but underneath it's all just individual items of data in a massive database. Previously, the only goal of the mormon church's genealogy efforts was to perform ordinances in biological relationships - biological parents to child, biological parents to each other. That also matched up with the nuclear family structure of the 50s which the church is also in favor of, so the concepts got a bit mixed. I'm not involved in the project, but my guess is that their current goal is to make their system the single clearinghouse for all genealogical data. If everyone is using it, then the mormon church will always have access to all the data it needs for the ordinances. Merging different databases is a massive pain, it's much simpler to record everything in the same place. Other people will only use this system if it's flexible enough to meet their needs, so I think that's why it's more flexible now.