Research Help.
Is fantastic, and often very helpfull, however it would be even more wonderful if there is a way to eliminate duplications of the same documents already attached. It is sometimes impossible to go through every person in your tree, because of all the hundreds of attachments, just to be able to establish that the correct persons are in their correct families, and it literary takes hours and much patients to do corrections.
Sincerely,
Memory Smith
Answers
-
If we dismiss duplicates, incorrect information goes to the hinting algorithms. And, even if you did manage to dismiss all those hints, the system would dig deeper and find less probable suggestions.
When you work on a family, more research helps or hints will develop. That is how a hint system is designed. One of the major for-pay genealogy websites removed the number from the hint leaf because people were frustrated that they could never reduce it to zero.
There's no rule saying we have to clear all the hints. Each of us works at a different pace, with different goals.
0 -
Thank you Aine,
I understand, however it is not necessary to clear all the hints from a person, they are extremely necessary, only duplications and incorrect attachments, but the problem is that not everyone actually inspects the documents that appear in the Hints, they just attach them anyway, and this is where confusion happens, especially when there are families that all have the same named children, with different birthdates, places and parents, and we actually have to spend hours, if not days, trying to sort out who belongs where, and trying to find proof and making corrections.
The pace we work at is understood, but we should surely all have the same goals, to strive to do this important work to the best of our ability and to supply correct information where all our families are concerned.
Sincerely,
Memory Smith.
0 -
I find it helps to get familiar with the sources available for a profile: what records were created of any particular type of event in that person's time and place, and what happened to those records later, especially as regards FamilySearch. This tells me how many sources I'm likely to be dealing with for each event. When they start piling up, I console myself that it's far better to have too many than none at all.
Yes, a proliferation of source attachments makes unconflating profiles take longer, but in the few cases where I had to do so, so far (and knock on wood that it stays that way), I found that having the sources all attached, and therefore easier to get to, actually helped with the sorting out. It was much harder to figure out the conflated profiles where neither previous contributor had bothered with any sources, so the only things attached were from a third contributor, of the "computer is always right" school of thought. (Neither of the things he attached were actually for either of the conflated men, being the birth and death register entries of the stillborn sister of one of them.)
I don't know if it's just in the parts of the world where my relatives lived, but I find that relatively few "duplicate" sources are actually duplicates — and I'm not just talking about the strict "same URL" sense. I also mean that very few of them go back to the same record of the same event, and even when they do, one image may be in better focus than the other, so they're not equivalent. Also, if both images were indexed, as often happens, then this gives (at least) two different people's readings of the document. As they say, több szem többet lát "more eyes see more". (The same applies to multiple indexings of the same image.)
1
