The new layout --my ancestors are being incorrectly merged with wrong people.
I understand someone decided to redesign the Person pages in the Family Tree, and someone must not have liked having a brief description of the person at the top of the page.
The problem is people are too quick to merge.
They see a name like Elizabeth Jones and they merge it.
It doesn't matter if Elizabeth had a sister that died before she was born and her name was reused. Or that Elizabeth Jones had 3 cousins with the same name born the same year all living in the same village.
People don't read and do enough research.
This is not your fault, but it is the -biggest- drawback to a shared world tree: someone comes along and incorrectly breaks family lines due to the simple mistake of thinking 2 Elizabeths are the same person. Then someone tries to fix it by unhooking the wrong family members. Then...orphaned people in the system.
Then, new duplicates made until someone correctly merges and fixes the families.
Then the cycle of broken families starts ALL OVER AGAIN when someone incorrectly merges the same 2 Elizabeths again.
I've been sharing research on FamilySearch for 10 years now. I see this problem ALL THE TIME. Every year. Can you not do something to help this very frustrating problem from happening all the time??
I think it was important to mention in the description of a person these details. It is a part of their description. All of these details are either buried in the collaboration or bottom of the page now.
Why should these important facts be buried?
Answers
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So I agree that having the life story up top was most assuredly a good thing and the fact that it has been moved is a decision I disagree with. However, I have been told over and over there is a way for you to make something even better in the new person page. You can go into collaborate and make a note. In the process of making a note, you have a check box for making it an alert. If you check it, the alert appears more clearly visible than the life story was. If you want to see an example, go to KCBD-HC7. Does this help any?
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As Gail says, one of the things the new page adds is the Alert Note, which puts a banner across the top of the page telling users to please read the note before making changes. The banner can be neither closed nor moved.
On the old page, the Life Sketch can be closed. I always had it closed, because I'm interested in genealogy, not biography. Therefore, all of your uses of that field for collaboration notes would have been utterly lost on me.
On the new page, the biography can be moved to the top of the details page, using "My Layout Settings" under Tools (in the right-hand column). It can also replace the computer-generated text on the fluff page (the About tab). Therefore, if your interest lies in biographies, the new layout offers better tools.
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The repeated bad merging you describe is not typical. It is likely that the profiles in question have some residual information or attached sources that do not belong, that are resulting in the bad merges. If you would share some PIDs where you are seeing this, we can offer additional suggestions to stop the problem.
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Although this might be "not typical", as "dontiknowyou" puts it, I find it to be quite common. There is no one reason (apart from carelessness) that this happens and I certainly don't find the problem any more prevalent since the new page was introduced.
I thought the Alert Note feature was one of the best things about the new page(s), but my comments have still been ignored and changes / merges been carried out, however prominent my "caution before making a merge" advice appears.
Whilst Family Tree retains its present open-edit format, there is just nothing we can do to stop incorrect merges being made by any other user determined enough to take this action. I know this comment won't help, but you are far from alone: it often takes me (and others - as reports confirm) two or three days to correct a particularly complex set of incorrect merges. As has often been pointed out, at least we can correct things in Family Tree: with other websites, you would just have to shout at the screen, knowing the false / locked details about your ancestors can't be changed.
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Thanks for the comments, and yes I stand by my statement this (incorrect merging) is typical issue.
FamilySearch has made great improvements to the merge process (now people don't get orphaned in the system during the merging process, yay) but the incorrect merging still happens.
Yes, I know they put a nice big message in red at the top of the page.
However, not all FamilySearch users are as technologically savvy as us. For instance, I've repeatedly trained a family member to "click underlined links" to view additional information, and tried to teach them to look for additional tabs that open more information, but years later they still struggle. What is common and intuitive to us may not be so for others. (Even expanding and collapsing the LifeStory field, as one person mentioned, is not intuitive to some.)
So, for the unsavvy, all she sees at the top of the page is a red message. It doesn't tell her anything helpful and she doesn't have the skill to follow the information.
The following is an example of a person that has been incorrectly merged twice in the past 3 months. The day I originally posted this message, I fixed someone's incorrect merge. I painstakingly went through EVERY SOURCE, all the details, etc. I fixed it all (all the sources and details were my research and I fixed for both persons after restoring the id#--the fault can not be blamed on leftover data for this case).
I made the red alert note.
The next day, the fixed people were remerged, undoing all my work again. No reasons or sources.
If you look at the 2 people, you can clearly tell this person could not be married to 2 men in 2 different states having children at the same time.
November was the last time someone had merged it incorrectly before the 27th. That incorrect merge was by a different person. As Paul earlier said, there could be a number of reasons why an incorrect merge happens. This case deals with Colonial Virginia, and usually that means someone didn't know who the parents where and made the best guess match. Obviously they were wrong, but the only way you can stop them from making the same mistake is to (1) educate them they are 2 different people, or (2) find the correct parents for the other person, which is difficult to start research from nothing during a time of few records for women when you are unrelated to that person.
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/changelog/MY9X-Y2M
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/changelog/LHZV-MM7
I've only shared this one example, Dorothy Jones, because when you look in the change history you will see I clearly wrote everywhere I could they were not the same person.
For the past few days I've been fixing, researching, and sourcing another incorrect merge someone made between 2 different William T. Chappells, but in that case I did not realize someone would make the error of assuming the 2 men were the same man - the only similarity they shared (besides their name) were both had moved from GA to AL.
I spend almost as much time researching my own ancestors and relatives as I do unrelated families that have been incorrectly merged and no one knew their stories.
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@Alexis Hok -- Thanks for the links to your change logs. I noticed you took one of FamilySearch's "canned" answers for a reason to merge. This happens to be one of my pet peeves.
May I suggest a better template to use in preparing a reason to merge people. Use Notepad to type up your thoughts and comparisons that stood out to you, before you get to the final merge "finish" step. Here is a sample template you could start from each time:
Then just copy-and-paste from your Notepad into the Reason box, before you click Finish (instead of selecting from FamilySearch's over-simplified reasons).
This will give other users some clarity that you have really thought it through, so they will know what to look for themselves in case they doubt your thoroughness.
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