"You're Related to..." and Quality Score
I just got an email saying I'm related to ______. I've always taken these with a grain of salt since I'm not sure how well all the lines are researched and verified. However, is the new quality score now being applied to these leads so they are more likely to be accurate?
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Got the same email…said I was related to George Washington. Took the same grain of salt approach, if it's on the internet is must be true. Well sort of. I did my research and was able to verify 40% of the relatives. Comparing father to son I found that the father did not belong to the son, same name just someone else. So my hopes of being related to someone famous were smashed. Guess it did make me check.
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Hello I too receive these emails - Princess Diana no less - and also with the same salting opinion. It’s a fun fact, but is it true ? All depends on the accuracy of the various lines which I have a somewhat jaundice view seeing how easy it is to add, modify people without any real supporting evidence. Ditto with having X thousand cousins from RootsTech, though in this case connecting with the nearest cousin may produce interesting supplemental information.
But all this does demonstrate, especially when ancestors have large families, that descendants explode outwards exponentially and in the end the further back we go the more likely we are related to each other further down the line.
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@aje1 - as far as I know, the Quality Score system is currently active only on people born after 1800 - exact date may vary according to locality, but that's the ball-park.
Most of the links to Famous People depend on stuff going back much further than that, so I believe that the Quality System will add nothing - so far.
According to my Notification, I am related to 6 Famous People. There follows a list of seven…, one of whom is my 12th cousin twice removed (more commonly known as Queen Elizabeth II).
Personally, I'd hope that some time soon the Quality checks will at least look at absurdities like my supposed 9-greats grandmother - an essential link to QE II - being born on 1 June 1622 in Virginia Colony then baptised the following November in Essex, England, before trotting back across the Atlantic…
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"Much-Ado about nothing"
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The quality score can only look at the consistency of the data on a profile compared to itself and to the attached sources. All the data and sources can have great internal consistency and all of it be completely wrong. Users need to always be aware that a high quality score says nothing about the accuracy of a profile. So, no, it cannot now and it may never be able to flag incorrect relationships that are based on incorrect but consistent data.
@Adrian Bruce1 Regarding absurdities, yes, it is picking out some things such as in this topic in which the original poster thought the quality checker was doing a terrible job when in fact it was doing a great job and led to a correction of incorrect data in the Places database:
I just checked, though, by putting in a christening place in the US while the birth was in Norway and this did not trigger a quality problem flag. I'm going to suggest it should.
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@Gordon Collett - "All the data and sources can have great internal consistency and all of it be completely wrong." Indeed…
Re "… a christening place in the US while the birth was in Norway and this did not trigger a quality problem flag …" Yes - as you probably realise, there might be some subtle issues around that. Being born in Norway and baptised 12y later (say) in the USA, isn't necessarily a problem. And being born in Virginia Colony in 1775 (British Colonial America if you must!) and baptised in the same town in the USA in 1776 is also probably not an issue. So maybe the check needs to include both mileage and time elements. Interesting…
But I think the key is to come up with some wording that suggests that there may be a problem but admits that there might not be.
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Working yesterday, I saw many warnings for errors there weren't really problems. The family I was working on had been multiplied by one of the projects creating profiles from the census. Of course, the names weren't quite the same, the years of birth weren't quite the same, the places of birth were general on one and specific on the other. Sigh. Yes, I know. Gave me good practice in writing solid reason comments.
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