one copy of source
Is it possible to have just one copy of the same source listed on our person rather than 6, 7, 8, etc as in birth, death, marriage, census, etc.
I recently spent 4 hours adding almost a hundred sources to three people and many of them had several copies of the exact same thing.
Dianne Bignell
Comments
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I would agree as far as truly duplicate sources. Some sources are flagged as “retired” because they are duplicates but the record still exists on FS and it’s retired status is not easily seen, which means when I’ve detached some of these records they were often attached again by other users.
Sometimes, however, what looks like duplicate records are actually two different recordings of the same event. For example, in Virginia BMD registers were kept by each county but registers were copied and sent to the State. Both sets have now been indexed and are available as FS sources. Sometimes they don’t agree since copies were done by hand.
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The only way I think FamilySearch could improve on the current position (which often leads to a sources section that is really difficult to arrange / navigate) is to be more careful in checking whether an identical record has already been indexed / published, so this type of duplication can be avoided. For example, there are many FamilySearch records that are marked "another filming" in the Catalog, so I don't know why this identical material should have been the subject of a second indexing project.
In some cases, I have three or four versions of the exact same parish record baptism entry in "Sources". Careful record keeping should have meant time and effort should not been applied to creating these duplicate records - especially when there is so much completely new material waiting to be indexed.
In summary, it sometimes is a difficult task to distinguish between two totally different versions of a record (as in Eric's example, where indexing both could be really worthwhile), but efforts to avoid indexing the exact same record twice should be avoided - in order to prioritise valuable resources and to cut down on any unnecessary clutter in Sources sections.
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