Identification and Person ID codes.
There are nine variations of the spelling of the surname of Rachel Sheerer, wife of John Witbeck (MPMJ-1FF), Rachel's familysearch ID code is LZJ7-4BX, with nearly as many different ID codes. I wish to discuss the possible justification, by circumstantial evidence and process of elimination, for establishing a single ID code for Rachel Sheerer Witbeck, who, quite likely, was married twice and whose married surname at the time of her death was Winters. U S Federal Censuses from the 1800s and extantial, cemetery-gravestone information and situational locations of them provide evidence, some admittedly, circumstantial, substantiating the justification for this action.
Best Answers
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If the algorithm does not suggest the other profiles as Possible Duplicates, you can use the "Merge by ID" function (in the Tools box). Note the warning:
Merging is a complex process in which you decide if two people are the same person. If they are, you choose which information should be kept. Please take the time necessary to carefully review each possible duplicate.When the FamilySearch Family Tree was created, indexes of many old records were used to create profiles. When records had been indexed many times, duplicate profiles were the result. When a couple were parents of many children, all of whom were baptized or their births registered, duplicate couples, families, and their related ancestors were created.
It's an ongoing (and possibly never-ending) effort to clean up the old multiple profiles through the Merge process.
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I'm not seeing any suggested duplicates for the version of Rachel that's attached as Jan's wife, but that of course doesn't mean there aren't any.
I'm not specifically familiar with this part of the world tree, but it looks familiar anyway: like the parts of the tree where I work, it was populated a dozen years ago with legacy data from FS's prior systems. In those prior systems, sets of profiles were created based (verbatim) on indexes of vital records, but there was no mechanism for combining profiles from different vital events. If a set of parents had ten children baptized, the index of the baptismal register could lead to ten different profiles for each parent. As much as we might debate the wisdom of importing all of those unconnected tryptichs into the then-new Family Tree back in 2012, the fact is that they were imported, and are here. One of our tasks, therefore, is to clean them up by merging the duplicates.
As with all edits to the collaborative Tree, anyone can do these merges, and there's no overseeing body that one needs to consult with or justify anything to. We should, of course, take care with merges, making sure we aren't conflating different people, and also making sure to record useful reasons for our actions. (My usual merge reason takes the form "PID-OLD was a legacy-data duplicate of PID-NOW based on the indexed [event] of [his/her] [relationship] in [year].")
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Under PIDs for Rachel with aberrant spellings of the surname,(perhaps, due to scanning and OCR or OMR technology), the term "similar records" is used and a variant spelling of her name, still, as the wife of Jan Witbeck, is given. This occurs for each of her children, for whom birth or christening records existed in the Dutch Reformed Church in West Copake, New York.
I would be inclined to merge them all, since fragmentary records prove nothing different. I know, for certain, that her son, Broer (Brewer) is my 3rd great grandfather, that Rachel's body is buried between Brewer and his son, David B. Woodbeck/Witbeck in North Nassau Cemetery in Rensselaer County, New York and that Rachel was married to a Jacob Winters and had a son named Cornelius Winters in1809. In the greater human family, will it make any difference??
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