How to "Fix" a persons record with common name and many incorrect attachements?

Jessica16860 · September 15

I am facing a common issue when searching for family history…

Common First Names: James, John, Nancy, Mary, Elizabeth

Common Last Names: Jones, Johns, Davis

and Seniors, Juniors, III. etc.

One particular person I have been looking at seems to have had a lot of people adding to it over the years and only a few of the sources/attachments pertain to the person in my history, The clearest indicator of the sources referring to two different people is as simple as one person cannot be two places at once and no one is traveling from Missouri to Virginia for the weekend in 1870.

I would like to clean up my tree and make it accurate, but I do not want to remove someone else's work where they have this person inked to their family. My instinct is to start a new entry for the person in my family and create the links necessary to fix this issue. This method seems to be lacking inaccuracy for the misinformation left behind and potential creating a bigger problem than I am solving.

Long story short… What is the best way to fix errors and not mess things up?

Julia Szent-Györgyi · September 15

I don't think there is a single "best way".

When someone "hijacked" an ancestral couple for whom I had only their names and their one son's birth, I took the Elsa path and let them go, creating new profiles for my actual ancestors, because that was a whole lot easier than dealing with the other couple's dozen children (with the wrong religion in a different country).

On the other hand, when the individual-tree sites began propagating a piece of fiction that made the Famous Relative's great-uncle into his father (because they shared a name, and the elder married a baroness), I pre-emptively did everything I could think of to make that error impossible to copy to the Tree, such as adding the "no children" fact to the great-uncle and the baroness. (Knock on wood, it seems to have worked so far.) I'm sure that if someone messed with this branch, I'd go on a corrections rampage, reverting every conclusion and undoing every merge until everyone was back where he or she belonged. (And then I'd get bogged down in the rabbit holes revealed by the errors.)

It sounds like your case is not at either of those extremes, which perhaps makes it the hardest choice of all: if both starting fresh and detangling look equally difficult, which do you choose? Theoretically, detangling allows you to restore conclusions instead of typing them anew, but sometimes, re-typing is easier than finding … And I don't know which approach would be less likely to result in the computer re-suggesting the conflation.

Gordon Collett · September 15

Here a couple of thoughts as to how to approach a profile that is clearly a combination of multiple profiles.

First I would go to the Change Log, scroll go the very beginning of it, and look at all the changes dated 2012. The information there is what was directly imported from New Family Search. If all those entries look to be for a single person then you are in luck because that means all the errors you are seeing took place in Family Tree and can be reversed. However, if the 2012 information clearly is a mix of several people, then you will have to start over with some of the profiles because you won't be able to easily separate out things that happened prior to 2012 in New Family Search, the immediate predecessor to Family Tree.

Next, I would, still in the Change Log, click the filter button and select Merges from the options there and see how many merges have been involved in what you see. I'll need to make up an example to explain this.

Let's name the current profile A. Looking at merges, we see that profiles B, C, D, and E have been merged into A. Write down the four ID numbers then use those ID numbers to go to the deleted/archived profiles. You can't see much of the information on them directly, but you can everything in their Change Logs. Again filtering for merges, we see that profiles F and G were merged into B; C has no merges; profiles H, I, J, and K were merged into D; and E has no merges. Again write down all the ID numbers and check those where we see that F, G, H, I, and J had no merges but L and M were merged into K. Now checking L and M we see they had no merges.

Now you have a list of the ID numbers for A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I , J, K, L, and M. What is important to remember, is that when a record is merged into another one, it is frozen in it's pre-merge state. Nothing else can happen to it. That means that C, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M are still exactly what they were before the merge. Suddenly things look quite doable.

I find it works best to work backwards, that is, at the end of the merge tree.

So I would go to profile M and click Restore. You now have that profile back as it was prior to the merge and you can use it to remove all information in profile A that clearly came from M. Do the same with profile L to restore it and remove its information from A.

Now you can restore profile K. It will probably have information from M and L that will need to be removed. Then proceed up the list.

After separating out the various original profiles, you may see that you really don't have to fix all that much more.

However, you will see in this process that often relationships don't restore very well. Usually you have to go into the Change Log of children and spouses and scroll to the early entries to see who their original parents or spouse was and manually transfer them back to the right spot.

The new Merge Analysis View you will sometimes see in the Change Log can be very useful because sometime there you can see that a merge was clearly correct and not have to undo that one. This is really useful when you have a long list of merges that were to combine a batch of child-parent twigs (family groups consisting of just a mother, father, and one child) into a full family.

Now that you have a separated set of profiles you can further clean up each one, remerge any that really are for the same person, and get sources moved to just the profiles they belong to. You need to get rid of any stray information that might trigger the duplicates routine to suggest that the profiles you just separated are possible duplicates.

I actually find this kind of work to be sort of fun.

If you have not done much with the Change Log or with restoring conflated profiles, these videos would be very good investment of your time:

Sometimes if things are too big of a mess, you may end up deciding to just find the profiles out of all the ones that have been merged that are for the person you are interested in, restore just those profiles and merge them properly, remove any information pertaining to your profile from the A profile, and leave the rest for someone else to deal with.

How to "Fix" a persons record with common name and many incorrect attachements?

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