just one copy of source

Dianne Bignell

Is it possible with technology as it is now that we receive just one copy of a source as in birth, death, marriage, census, etc rather than six copies of the same thing. I recently had a couple of people with 30-40 sources and many of them were repeats of the same thing.

VERY TIJME CONSUMING

Carla Tobler

@Dianne Bignell

We appreciate your question about sources in Family Tree.

We are attaching an article from the Help Center that we hope will give you more insight regarding the sources/record hints. It explains why duplicate record hints exist, and what to do about them.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/what-do-i-do-with-duplicate-record-hints-in-family-tree

This information is taken from the article:

Why duplicate record hints exist

Apparent duplicates can occur for many reasons:

• The record was indexed more than once.
• The event appears in more than one collection. For example, the same marriage record can appear in a county marriage collection and a state marriage collection.
• The record was filmed more than once.
• The collection itself contains duplicate records.

What to do about duplicate record hints

Look at the URL of each record hint. Each one should have a different and unique URL.

• If the apparent duplicate has a unique URL but is not about the person, mark it as Not a Match.
• If the apparent duplicate has a unique URL and is about the person, click Review and Attach as usual. Be aware that when you dismiss apparent duplicates, it can prevent the hinting system from finding record hints for the person in the future.
• If the apparent duplicate has the same URL as another record hint, please contact FamilySearch Support.

We hope this helps.

Paul W

@Dianne Bignell

A similar point has been raised at https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/125597/my-question-is-about-duplicate-sources#latest, where I have commented on the issue.

I agree that it is frustrating when these records contain identical data, but very often this will not be the case. Even with census records, I have found an ancestor's name has been indexed differently (from project to project), meaning that I would have found an individual / family almost impossible to find using one indexed set, but quite straightforward in using another.

For my English ancestors, I have found two original records of the same event - say a baptism entry indexed from both the parish register and the Bishops Transcript - sometimes contain different detail that I would not been aware of if only one version of the baptism record had been made available.

The one thing FamilySearch might be able to take more care of is in their indexing the exact same records and including the exact same data. For some reason, I am finding this happening in relation to indexed parish records for one particular county, whereby up to three sets of records have recently been published that contain the exact same detail. This appears to be an unnecessary waste of effort by volunteer indexers and researchers alike. However, so-called "duplication" is more often likely not to be literally that, and usually does occur for justifiable reasons.