Duplicate suggested sources
Many of the source suggestions for my family tree members are duplicates of sources already saved. When I delete them they just reappear the next time I turn on the computer. Currently one family member has 12 suggested sources and they are all the same source. If I delete the suggestion another person will add it to the sources and there I have found up to 25 of the same source saved to a single person. If I mark them as a duplicate the will appear in the suggested sources when I refresh the page. In Ancestry I can mark the sources suggestion as already saved, Is there a way family search could do this also. It is frustrating to look at sources and have to scroll through so many of the same source. Thank you for your consideration.
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In my opinion as well - there does need to be a way of aggregating similar sources. Many times what you are thinking of as duplicate is in reality another separate index of the same 'original source'. So it is a duplicate index of the original source. This just points out the need for future development in this regard...
You can - if offered - tag the source as Birth, Death, Name, etc. so that does aggregate them somewhat - but doesn't join/contain them on the Sources tab.
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If the source citations really are duplicates (same URL for the same index entry), then something has gone wrong. I have never encountered this, but I seem to recall a discussion a few years ago, where the solution was found to be to detach all instances of the duplicate, and then re-attach it.
If the citations merely look like duplicates (different URLs, different index entries), then the "culprit" can be a re-filmed page or register, a re-indexing project, bishop's or archive copies, or some combination of these. Another source of apparent duplication is too-generic citation titles. (For example, GenealogyBank obituaries often have identical titles, even though they're from different newspapers.) Regardless of the reason for the proliferation, such citations will automatically be grouped together on a Sources tab that's sorted by date (which is the default).
One reason for keeping all of the citations referring to a single event is as verification that you're reading the record(s) correctly. If one index has the surname as Limon, but there are six others where it's Simon, you can be pretty sure that you're right in reading it as Simon. There are also algorithmic reasons for retaining them all: the hinting system uses prior source attachments to suggest new ones.
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I had a similar question this morning regarding sources for Reuben Brooks (19 October 1763 – 21 October 1843) • L4H9-7YD. He has at last count 131 sources. I asked about a means to delete/detach/weed out "duplicates." A phone helper explained that, unless the URLs were IDENTICAL (not similar) that they were generated from different sources or similar sources coming from different points of origin. I understand why this is as it is.
Reuben Brooks had some 24 children from two wives. The first daughter, Rocksa, named after her mother, had two birth sources and three baptism sources. Calculating an average of three entries per child--very conservatively--that would come to 72. If we add christening, marriage, and death, we will have over 200 entries for the children alone. If we add Reuben and his two marriages, well ... you get my point.
As Julia mentions above, "Another source of apparent duplication is too-generic citation titles." Of Rocksa's five sources, four had the same title, which means that you must flip through all to find a specific entry you saw once but can't find now .... I would like to see more included in the Source Titles.
Working within what I am allowed to do on my own, I have edited the earliest Source Titles on Reuben's list (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/L4H9-7YD). You can see that I've added just enough to sort the births from the baptisms. I've also clarified a few names in the titles by placing the respellings in brackets, a standard editing technique. We all need to see that extra information in the "At a Glance" basic list, not tucked away in the expanded version. Thanks.
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Family search kind of Explained this to me, I wish they would explain to people, It has to do with the Original source and sources from 3rd party. Best Bet keep the Original and clean up the Others.
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