Conflict Free Data
This person has 11 children. Most people had 10 or fewer.
I think the number of children needs to be changed to a higher number, one of my ancestors had 28 children, all documented and proven, he did have two wives and triplets.
Comments
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I was just looking at someone with 23 children, from three wives. (He's too early for the algorithm, thank goodness.) I agree that ten is way low for men, and even for women, a dozen is not unusual. (Depending on the time and place, finding them all can be the unusual part.)
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I believe that one of the reasons this gets flagged is that the number was set by an average of statistical means. But the statistics for average family size for 1800, 1890 and 1950, are all very different.
ON THE OTHER HAND, this limit is a good red flag for what can happen in a poorly completed merge. We had a situation where a couple in the Conneticut colony was merged with a different family, but the parents had the same name in New Jersey. As a result, there were 28 children when there should only have been 14. To me having a system that spots these type of errors is helpful. (That one took me about a week to unscramble.)
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@DelythWaugh can you provide a PID for the ancestor that you are looking at?
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Hi, the person was GLJD-626 William Davies. But I have dismissed the conflict
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"This person has 11 children. Most people had 10 or fewer.
"I think the number of children needs to be changed to a higher number, one of my ancestors had 28 children, all documented and proven, he did have two wives and triplets."
With respect, citing an ancestor with 28 children misses the point of the warning. This is not trying to detect some absolute limit, so that the message never appears for your relatives, this is trying to warn people of unusual numbers. As @monnettohio says, they had the warning came up as a result of a bad merge. Making 28 acceptable, as suggested, would have resulted in no warning, which seems a bad idea.
Having said that, I think that there are some tweaks that could be done.
I'm not sure if the check really is done on a single profile by looking at all their children, but I would think that it might be worth looking at biological children within a single family. My GG-GF had 11 children but that was spread over two wives. A family of 6, followed by a family of 5 is, I suggest, inherently more likely than one of 11.
Also, confine such checks to biological children as some really weird results can appear if you start looking at ages for step-children compared to the age of the step-parent. (This is an issue I've seen elsewhere).
I would regard it as sensible if the limit allows 95%? 98%? of families without comment. (And yes, the limit probably needs to alter depending on time period.)
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@DelythWaugh thank you for the PID. It helps to look at a specific place and time :)
@Adrian Bruce1 Thank you for the feedback. You have some great suggestions :)
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