Unfinished attachments: what's the cause?
These messages compel me to do something. Should I just dismiss them or configure the filter to just not show them? I don't like either of these options as they are glossing over the underlying problelms.
I have noticed at least two types of issues:
1) There are more than just family members in the house. I added them as employees (that got room and board), but still could not attach them with either the old or the new linker.
2) The person to be attached is "UNKNOWN". Generally from Public Records, there are no attached images. Is this a paywall thing or what?
I am so tired of looking at them I am about to just filter the message out.
Answers
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The reason for those notices is that index entries come in groups. For example, an indexed group can be all of the participants in a baptism, or all of the members of a household in a census, or everyone named in a funeral notice or obituary.
The frequency of "unfinished attachments" notices varies by the type of source record and the decisions made by the compilers of the index. At the one extreme are things like city directories, where nearly every entry in the index is in a group of one, so once it's attached, that's it, and the system has nothing to generate notices about. At the other extreme are collections where the record custodians inexplicably wanted every name indexed, including the medical professionals, clerks, and clergy who are recorded on vital certificates. Virtually every source attached from such a collection will generate the notice.
Sometimes, the notice is useful: it alerts me that I never got around to finding or entering the spouse's parents from the marriage record, for example. However, as you said, sometimes the notice is for people who will never be tracked down -- boarders in censuses, midwives at births, officiants at weddings. The latter case is why there's a "dismiss" option on the notice.
Unfortunately, the system can't tell whether any particular "stray" in an index grouping is in that first category or the second. Sometimes, the midwife is the sister-in-law. Therefore, such strays need to be looked at individually, and the notices need to be dismissed one by one.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi What you say seems valid but it does not really adress the problems:
It seems that attaching the head foreman for a , period of years would be nice to be able to do.
It seems that records should have actual information rather than UNKNOWN.
I have gone thru a person since that post, dismissed many "unfinished attachments", and adding some live people, which hardly seems worth the time.
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