Duplicate suggested sources

JRogers1

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.

genthusiast

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.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

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.