Cautions upon entering new profile
I see a problem that occurs daily and causes a lot of extra work, and confusion.
A new person decides to add a profile for someone based on their research. They enter a profile, their spouse, parents, and children all being new profiles. .......Here is where the problem arises... They do not search enough and they are adding a duplicate with slightly different information. Then some of us need to spend a lot of time merging the new entries to the original profile. Today I spent over an hour with one persons entries.
Since most important people before about 1600 already have a profile this happens literally dozens of times daily on just people in my tree,
My suggestion is a large advice box pop up that appears when a user starts to add a new profile. The box could say something like
CAUTION. Most persons born before 1600 already have a profile. PLEASE do an extensive search before adding your new profile(s) so you are not duplicating an existing profile.
Comments
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Or even get them to click a button confirming they have checked this person does not already exist in the Tree.
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Frankly, I think it is better to create a possible duplicate person if you are not 100% sure they are the same people and indicate this possibility in notes. I have a place in my ancestors where 3 first cousins are named Robert; they lived in the same town and all were born within 5 years of each other. Their fathers are all brothers and the boys were named after their grandfather. I am sorting this out in Ancestry, but it is a slow process. Meantime, in FamilySearch there is at least one Robert who has a mixture of sources that belong to at least 2 cousins. Now I'm going out on a limb here and saying don't assume there is only one person if you aren't sure. If you don't have enough information to know if there were 2 or one, better to have the duplicates which can be merged if necessary. I'm getting a much clearer picture in Ancestry of the 3 lives, but which one belonged to which parents is still not totally clear. In the meantime, I'm letting the FamilySearch Robert mixture alone until I know everything I need to about which cousin belonged to which set of parents.
And here is another complex example that is slowly sorting itself out and is a prime example of why you should create those dups because you CAN'T necessarily get all the facts up front. Just because someone has linked a family to a person of the right name doesn't mean they have it right. For my volunteer work as a lineage researcher, I am working on a family unit from the mid 1800s where a man's second wife has the exact same first name as his daughter from a previous wife. The reason this is complicated? The second wife was 2 decades younger than him and close in age to the daughter. Because this second wife's maiden name had never been determined by anyone, there is a confusion of people who think his daughter, not wife, was living with him in the 1880 census, or that his wife was the only person by that name and the daughter was a mistake. By the late 1800s it is clear there were 2 separate women because the daughter eventually married, but not everyone creating person pages got that memo. The two women have their origins and person pages all over the place. I was able to find 2 sources that apparently no one has seen which sort out the separate women and it turns out the second wife is only 3 years older than the daughter. I found a marriage record for his second marriage which named her maiden name as well as her parents. He is listed as a widower, thus confirming this marriage as at least his second. Astonishingly, I also found an 1853 birth record for the daughter naming the [apparent] previous wife which settled everything. I edited my person page for the wife to display her maiden name, added her parents. I also added the first wife to the father and made sure the daughter was correctly linked to that couple. All sources were added. That doesn't fix the other duplicate / conflagration mess on several other person pages. For the present, I am not doing any merges until I continue to figure out the rest of the family's situation, and then I will try to fix it all.
Things are not always so easy to get right at the exact moment you are doing your work, and often it is premature to assume duplicate or not duplicate. Best advice is to create that duplicate when you aren't sure.
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Quoth Randall: "Most persons born before 1600 already have a profile" -- which I suppose is true, if you add an important phrase: "in some parts of the world". Or, alternately, "on one of the online genealogy sites". And, as Gail notes, even if a profile exists on FS, it may not be a good idea to assume it's your person, because there are many conflations and other errors that are propagated all around the online genealogy world (often based on 19th century inventions in published works). As tedious as merging gets, it's far, far easier than disentangling incorrect combinations of people. I would much rather deal with a duplicate family entered by a newcomer than a GEDCOM import overwriting years of work.
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As suggested, creating duplicates is rather less of a problem than conflating two or more individuals into one profile. In fact, for a number of my ancestors / relatives who lived in England in the 16th century, I have added a note that they should not be merged with another ID (which might closely resemble that person) unless there is concrete evidence the profiles do represent one and the same individual.
A large amount of the time I spend working on the Family Tree project is taken in unravelling the mess created by erroneous merges. Only today I spent several hours in trying to separate the details of at least three individuals named George Rutherford (who all lived in Scotland in the 19th century), who had had their 71 sources and multiple wives all added to the one profile!
It often needs an expert to work out the true identity of individuals of the same name, and often very similar identity. So, while I respect your desire to work towards the FamilySearch / Family Tree "goal" of having just one profile / ID for every individual, this has to be a very long term aim and not to be regarded with so much importance that it ends up with multiple individuals being put together as one.
Please take note of Gail's and Julia's advice on this matter and make sure you only carry out a merge if you are 99.9% sure you are really dealing with the same individual(s) - often far from a straightforward task.
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