Family Tree Flooded with Duplicates
Please see the record in Family Tree (FT) for: Mary Ann Turner Female 4 March 1859 – 22 April 1913 GWXT-L3N. As of 23 Sep 2023, she is listed in FT with 69 children. One child, Fannie Turner, is duplicated 59 times. When you look at her Latest Changes, you see that 16 other duplicates for Fannie have been merged by other people. Latest Changes also shows that most of the records for Fannie were entered into FT 4 April 2023. Fourteen records were added by a user with the Contact Name of CommunityCensus Project, and then many other records were added the same day by another user. Many of the records are mentioned in Latest Changes with references to a source, United States Census, 1900. The question is: how did FT allow all of those duplicates on 4 April? Usually, when new records are added into FT, FT flags them as possible duplicates. Perhaps these names were added in to FT with a GEDCOM. But the names had to be Computer Generated in some fashion if they all came in on the same day. So the other question is: if all of those names came in to FT because of some glitch or hiccup in FT, can they all be deleted from FT as a group, instead of manually merging all those duplicate records? Perhaps the Community has heard of similar things that have happened to FT, and what might be the best approach to resolve those duplicate records.
Answers
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There was a loophole (now fixed) in the FS App that allowed a source to be attached to multiple profiles. Add to that the issues created by the CommunityCensus Project (ongoing) AND the problems (now mostly fixed) with the 1900 US Census index, there is a major mess on this profile/family.
You might try the Report Abuse option in the Tools box for the profile GWXT-L3N.
Tagging @Alan E. Brown who may be able to look under the hood.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile said:
There was a loophole (now fixed) in the FS App that allowed a source to be attached to multiple profiles.
I see no evidence that this former behavior in the app is at all involved in this case. For one thing, I don't see any multiple attachments at this point. But this is so far in the past that there much of the evidence is no longer available, so I can't be sure.
It is a bit mysterious, however, since most of the profiles have the last entry in their change logs to be "Source Attached" for the 1900 US Census, with no subsequent detach action, and yet none of them (at least the 20 or so I sampled) have a single source attached at this point.
You might try the Report Abuse option in the Tools box for the profile GWXT-L3N.
That suggestion seems quite heavy-handed. I would only recommend reporting abuse if you have evidence of intentional misuse of Family Tree. This looks much more like incompetence or confusion (or possibly a software error, but I doubt that).
These problems seem to be localized to problems in one family with a couple of users involved, Unless there is evidence of a much more widespread problem I can't imagine that it makes sense to ask for an engineering solution to a user-created problem. It's tedious, but users who are concerned about the family can simply merge the duplicates and move on.
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@jlwestra said:
The question is: how did FT allow all of those duplicates on 4 April? Usually, when new records are added into FT, FT flags them as possible duplicates.
Family Tree allows duplicates, so there's no mystery there. Yes, FT will flag them as possible duplicates, but it's up to individual users to to see the warning and do something about it. It's still a judgment call. If a user ignores the warning, they can create as many duplicates as they'd like. Of course, no one hopes for duplicates to be created, but some users are unobservant, and some don't understand the warnings they are given, so some duplicates do get created.
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@Alan E. Brown explained
Yes, FT will flag them as possible duplicates, but it's up to individual users to see the warning and do something about it
Yes but is there really a human being at the other end of this series of transactions? These so-called Community census project transactions are a total menace creating massive duplication. They pretty much ignore any messages querying their actions and I did start to wonder whether there was some automatic involvement, which would explain why "they" didn't action the warnings. Just a gut feeling on my part...
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why does FS allow other than individual accounts (ie. Census Project, Volunteer Project, 1910 Census Project, etc) These accounts add a lot of uncertain information, excessive duplication, and other problematic data to the Tree. Also, there is no "personal accountability" for their actions. Just wondering why, why, why?
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@melville,dl said:
why does FS allow other than individual accounts (ie. Census Project, Volunteer Project, 1910 Census Project, etc)
I share your concerns about the Census Project accounts. But please don't lump in Volunteer Project with those others. The Volunteer Project user pertains only to the Improve Place-Names initiative that was created by FamilySearch. The only changes that will be made by Volunteer Project are the standardizing of place-names on events where there was previously no standard.
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The Volunteer Project user pertains only to the Improve Place-Names initiative that was created by FamilySearch. The only changes that will be made by Volunteer Project are the standardizing of place-names on events where there was previously no standard.
I appreciate your clarification. We'll be years cleaning up after the USCensusProject and can be a bit punchy about it. We don't want to unload on the folks doing actual good.
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@Alan E. Brown I'm not sure I can share your high opinion of Volunteer Project's contributions when I see something like this one:
It may now be "standardized," but I think it's a poor use of time to leave it looking like that, with both date and place poorly formatted.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile said "I'm not sure I can share your high opinion of Volunteer Project's contributions when I see something like this one:"
I don't know why you think I have a "high opinion of Volunteer Project's contributions." I simply said it was not anything like the users called Census Project, 1910 Census Project, etc. That's indisputably true.
As I said, the Volunteer Project user is used only for the Improve Place-Names initiative. It's still represents work done by volunteers, some of whom will make good choices, and some of whom will not. But in any case, what you showed has nothing to do with the change made by the Improve Place-Names. All that initiative does is set the standard; it leaves the original text untouched. To see the selected standard place, we would need to drill down a level -- that screen shot doesn't show the selected standard. It seems like you're complaining about the formatting of the original text, which by design remains unchanged.
Your complaint about the date is interesting, but the initiative is only for places, not for dates. Indeed, those who contribute via Improve Place-Names have no ability at all to touch the date format. If you'd like to propose some new initiative for Improve Date Standardization, then please do so, but this particular complaint seems like it's out of scope.
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Please do not fix the relationships for Mary Ann Turner or her daughter Fannie. We would like to figure out what happened here, but we need to see the mess to do that.
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