Geolocation warning
Could you please put a geolocation warning when parents or children are added too far away?
I've seen countless errors adding relatives over 200 miles in a time when only horseback or foot riding was around.
I see it relatively easy to do since you have the list of cities and towns and you just have to take the distance between the two and see if it is not too big.
It would help a lot to improve the accuracy of the tree, and thus not connect people who have nothing to do with each other.
Thanks
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At what stage in the process would you want this to happen?
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I agree that there is a problem. I am just not sure what the solution should be.
A simple advisory as to how far apart two locations are from each other can be quite useful. I think that does help in many instances with older records.
Location is one of the clues that people should carefully consider when researching. But people have always traveled, sometimes great distances, long before the automobile age.
Your knowledge of your family history is very important in determining if records at a particular location should be considered or excluded. Therefore, trying to "program in" a substitute for personal knowledge and common sense could be quite difficult.
For instance, you would have to exclude immigration records.
You would also have to exclude all records after the automobile and aviation era, because 20th and 21 century families moved around quite a bit.
Then we have the problem of records that are incorrectly "tagged" to the wrong location.
As an example, I research New York City, and have found many records for Brooklyn, New York that have been auto-corrected for "proper format" to Brooklyn, Delaware County, New York (population a few thousand) instead of Brooklyn, Kings County, New York City (population a few million). These two locations are almost 200 miles apart. I look at the images when available, to determine the correct location.
So to "program" a good solution for this problem, we would need to think about which records to include, and the "correctness" of the records, as well as the era in which the families lived. Otherwise, it may trigger too many advisories.
I think any "advisory" would have to be issued before a record attachment. Once a resource with a "wrong" location is attached. the "hints system", will continue to search for possible matches at this location, compounding the problem.
Detaching the mistake does not always correct the problem, as you must also delete any residence entries the "wrong" record added in the "other information" section of the record.
Anyway, I think a tool that displays the distance between different locations, and perhaps shows them on a map would be nice to have.
I will upvote to further the discussion.
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A feature that can serve this purpose is already in place: the map on the Time Line tab.
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Wow! That was fast!
Just kidding. I never used the timeline tab, so I learned something new today.
Thanks.
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I was thinking the Time Line may be sufficient, and it is a more general tool for profile quality control, as well as fun to look at.
There is no Time Line on the mobile app yet, sadly. The mobile app does paint the ancestry fan chart with birth nation, so that can help to spot location errors.
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Not really, the timeline is a clock, you don't use a clock as an alarm clock.
You need an alarm, something that tells you in the foreground that you are doing something that may be a mistake.
Familysearch has alarms for when there are duplicates, for when the mother is too old to have children, for when you have not entered the sex, for when a non-standard place was chosen, etc. This would be just one more.
I'm not talking about applying it on suggested helps. Only do it for when a child or a parent is added and she/he is more than 100 miles away, for example. Obviously if you think this is not an error, you just have to reject the warning with justification and move on.
And if this depends on the fact that they have added a wrong or a non-standard place, well, welcome, so that they have to put the correct place, and we start to make a family tree correctly.
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You need an alarm, something that tells you in the foreground that you are doing something that may be a mistake.
My preference would be fewer alarms, fewer hoops to jump through. Don't force the most productive contributors to migrate off Family Tree.
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I like the idea of a warning that you might be making an incorrect merge, based on location, in addition to age.
However, the people most likely to need this reminder will probably ignore it. I came across one instance of a merger who decided that every child born over a couple of decades, over a couple hundred miles, with a father named Johann Schmidt, had the same father. All the Johann Schmidts were merged so that he had 15 wives, many concurrently, and countless children who had overlapping birth dates. He must have been a very busy traveling salesman.
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"However, the people most likely to need this reminder will probably ignore it."
I agree. And I have come across similar situations to the example you described.
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