Family Groups created from Census Projects
I have come across a lot of ‘isolated family groups’ that were created from a single census record. There is some value to this, but also some headache.
Problem: When you are sourcing a person or family and review a census record and find that this record is already attached to another person. You check that person and see that this record is attached to the people named in the census with no other records or vitals other than the census. Now you need to merge each member of the family from this ‘isolated family group’ to your people before you can go on. And in doing so, if you don’t do it in the right order, you end up with parents having the same child attached to them with their spouse and without. This can eat up a bit of time.
Request: Have a way of doing a group merge for this instance. A way to say, this father, mother and children are the same in this group as in this group. Pick details to keep, and then do it at once.
For newer users this would help out a lot to keep relationships connected correctly. For experience users, speed things up. And help to make the work done creating these ‘isolated family groups’ not be a waste of time (sort of to speak) because it ends up taking more time latter to resolve into a family line.
Answers
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@Arend Visher see this very long thread
Is the user "TreeBuilding Project" taking the tree forward or wasting time? — FamilySearch Community
There you can find the background for this really annoying problem.
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I think the census projects got the idea from FS's legacy data imports in 2012. Most of those are also floating tryptichs of father, mother, and child — with the added problem that the originating source (usually an indexed baptism) isn't always attached. Cleaning them up is a tedious slog, so the idea of a three-at-a-time merge tool has its appeal, but I worry about the exponential increase in error possibilities. (If you think merging is a chore, try undoing an incorrect one.)
Also, it's a bit of a slippery slope: if I can do three at a time, but the couple has more than one child already attached, can I do four (or five, or twelve) at a time? If not, what happens with the other children?
Perhaps what we need is a "pre-merge assistant" that helps users compare multiple profiles (and their relationships) at once, and marks them for merge, but then the actual merges would be done the usual way, one at a time? This wouldn't help with the "spare" relationships that the process can create — those mostly come from transferring or not transferring relatives during the merge — but it would help reduce incomplete merges. (When combining a family with half a dozen daughters floating in the Tree, it's Very Easy to forget someone.)
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A help tool like you suggest is a start and would have benefits.
We want all the new people who get on to be able to get up and go, and these merges and not doing them in the correct way can be a stumbling block.
I would not limit family merge tool to just three. I think that perhaps you could have some safeguards in place like two or three times you have to check a box saying yes, this is the same set of people before you can go through the multi person merge and those check boxes explaining the downside of picking the wrong people.0 -
I've been experimenting re linking these standalone 'triplets' into the rest of the Tree, specifically in relation to BYU Record Linking Lab's bulk Numident inserts - see
(recent comment in the thread @Lars van Ravenzwaaij linked to above, with link to some detailed examples).
I found there was a great deal to take into account, I would be very nervous of doing more than one merge at a time.
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