Verify that the people being merged were created as same person and not edited to be same person
If we are going to lose the ability to undo a merge once edits have been made to the surviving person, can we figure out a way to prevent a person from being edited into a person that they were not originally meant to be?
For instance, this person was created in 2018 as William Farquharson. At some point, someone edited him to be an Alexander Edward. And then someone else came along later and merged him with another Alexander Edward. But he should still be a William Farquharson.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/changelog/L1Q6-K8Y
From what I can tell, this original William Farquharson was intended to be William Farquharson who was baptized 19 Jul 1722 at St. Nicholas in Aberdeen. These were the first details entered in this profile when it was created. So how can we make sure that it is clear that this is who he was originally intended to be and any details added should pertain to this William. For instance, if his name is changed, it is only to add a middle initial or suffix. His name should not be changed in a way that makes him an entirely different person.
I have seen this happen so many times where someone is morphed into someone that they are not and then someone comes along later and thinks they are a duplicate, but they actually aren't.
Answers
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In this thread, @Gordon Collett kindly included a link to the video about "Understanding Intended Identity."
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Yes. What he’s describing is exactly what I’m talking about. If the woman in that example was created as a specific person found in a specific record, how can we prevent people from changing her into an entirely different person and then merging her into an existing profile that matches the person she was morphed into?
And if features cannot be added to the website in order to prevent this, then why are we no longer able to unmerge people?0 -
We can restore a person - that hasn't changed. We have never been able to undo a merge once edits have been made.
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Ok. Restoring a person works.
But I have actually undone merges many times from the change log page.
But still, question stands. Is there anything else that can be done to help assure that a person is not edited to be a different person than the one originally intended and then merged with someone else??
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The undo merge option has never - in all the many years I've been using FamilySearch - been available once any additional edits have been made to a profile.
The best way to assure that the profile is not changed to another person is to document it thoroughly. Attach sources, proof statements, and put it on your Following list.2 -
And add Alert Notes which will pop up every time someone tries to change Vitals!
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Yes. I do all of that.
Unfortunately, people don’t read. Or they merge from a suggested match and don’t notice all of that. Or they merge from the Legacy Family Tree interface that doesn’t show any of those notes. Or they import from a GEDCOM and say that two people are a match when they aren’t and the wrong spouse gets attached and then the next person thinks changes need to be made to match the attached spouse. And then the original person is now morphed into someone else and merged. It’s insanity out there.
And I absolutely have unmerged people from the change log page and found the merge deep in the list of changes. I guess in lots of cases I have gone to the deleted person and restored them. But I do have memories of just hitting ’Unmerge’ even when the merge is found deep in the list of changes. I guess it doesn’t matter. I’ll just restore from now on. That works.
My main concern is how we can prevent these things from happening.
Like how can we indicate who a person was intended to be when they were created and how can we make that clear when changes are made or merges are done so that they don’t get morphed into someone else and than merged with that person
I think it’s better than it used to be. The features on the new person page that allow you to pin notes seems to have helped. But there are several different interfaces from which people can make edits or merges and I still see a lot of the predictable errors that I’ve had to fix a million times over the years.
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I just undo all that mess all the way to the originals. It happened several times in my family lines, and sent a nice but scolding message to the one cousin who mis-merged concerning one person. only to discover he also did wrong with another person today and promptly undid it.
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I think that the principle of looking for the "intended identity" is immensely valuable for gaining a perspective. However, I'm sort of dealing with an example at the moment that shows that even this principle has its limitations.
A sibling of one of my ancestors was married to someone in FS FT who made no sense. My relative came from Cheshire, but the marriage took place in Somerset. Looking right back in the Change Log for that profile, I believe that it had been created for the Somerset marriage and my relative had been merged in slightly later. However, the Somerset profile had been created and so much data added that same day, that I suspect all the original assembly had been done in another system - perhaps on the user's pc - and so I was getting no insight into the original intention.
The original intention is important because my relative's name is actually not the correct name for the Somerset marriage! This leaves me with the dilemma of whether to alter the name of the Somerset profile to match reality or disconnect that profile from the Somerset family, replacing it with a new, correct one, but leaving the disconnected profile orphaned for all eternity...
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How do we completely stop anyone from ever changing a person into a completely different person by changing the original name, birth, death into something completely different? ( https://wist.info/schiller-johann-von/5937/ ) All we can do at this point is be vigilant, repair this when we find it, and continually teach everyone we run into that FamilyTree is a shared tree that is supposed to contain one profile for every person that has ever lived and that it is not a personal tree that one "cleans up" by converting a complete stranger into Aunt Sally just because that other person does not belong in your tree.
Someone did ask in a RootsTech presentation if there was any intention of blocking a merge completely if it had the message "Merge Not Recommended: These 2 people have a high degree of inconsistency. Merging is not recommended." The answer was not at this point. But that would not solve the problem raised here that one could always change every bit of information on a profile then proceed with the merge.
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I was at that one in person. "Tree Integrity" first spoken there, about many ways to keep accurate profiles including Alerts from Notes. Right now I am undoing one very bad merge (turned out to be en-masse), restoring several profiles.
Additional caution, watch those using AI. I got one that was claimed to be that person (it wasn't! a white family of Illinois (my family) and a black family of St Louis Mo. This AI feature has no "reject" button, reported the issue. Exasperated with that one, hunted for correct family only to find no such family in the FT and created the correct family, linked the source to that correct family. It disappeared from my "5 recommends" for good.
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I spent lots of time on my family tree years ago and connected all the sources I could find to the first 5 or 6 generations. Pretty much all the time I spent on FS FT now is to clean up messes on people in older generations that are notoriously edited and 'messed up' in the same ways over and over again. It just seems like an issue that happens more than just every once in a while. And it's the same people with the same incorrect details being added constantly. So I was just wondering if there's anything more to be done about it.
I do love that we now have the ability to add the message box in red above the profile. I actually think that has been helpful. I know there are message boxes under birth and death dates, but mostly what I see there is 'corrected to standard format', which doesn't seem like a necessary think to make note of to me. When I do put specific notes there about dates, they seem to get ignored. I would love to see these notes appear next to dates in the merge screen.
Unfortunately, it seems like the merge procedure is getting an 'upgrade' and a lot of these warnings are disappearing. I'm afraid of what kind of nonsense we're going to get if the merge makes it even easier for people to make merges that shouldn't be made.
I'm curious if we could get alerts for our 'Following' list. If I got an email every time someone was edited, maybe I could stay on top if it before they're completely morphed into a different person. Maybe this option exists already, but I looked and couldn't find it.
I would really love to see a feature that adds a message box to the top of a profile that says something like…"This person was created on 3 April 2020 as John Doe born on 6 Dec 1923 and married to Georgia Smith. Any edits should be to add information pertaining to this individual." This message could be generated to include any information added by the person that created the profile on the day the profile was created.
Although, I have seen lots of people imported from GEDCOMs with completely wrong information. I feel like so much of this happens on Ancestry.com when people just import other people's trees without verifying anything. Then they export the GEDCOM and upload it here. So it's possible for a person to be created in the tree with details that don't make sense. As long as nothing prevents us from merging them with the most appropriate profile, I think we'd be good.
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Pertaining to "Someone did ask in a RootsTech presentation if there was any intention of blocking a merge completely if it had the message "Merge Not Recommended: These 2 people have a high degree of inconsistency. Merging is not recommended."
I do actually merge people like this all the time. Back to the situation where people that were not correct to begin with need to be merged into who they were probably intended to be.
In my tree, people always add a Hugh Ross that is said to have existed in the early 18th century. He appears in over 5,000 trees on Ancestry.com. Not just in my Ross line, but in lots of random, unrelated Ross lines. People like to use him to connect from early America back to Scotland. But he never existed. He's a conglomeration of 3 or 4 other Hugh Rosses, depending on which details are included. This is a fictional person who's been running around the internet for over a decade. He is added to the FS FT by someone almost monthly. So, I have a choice. Do I merge him with the Hugh Ross who usually matches his parents, but died 40 years earlier? Or do I merge him with the Hugh Ross that matches his wife who actually lived in the 1400s? The details that he is created with never match the person I'm merging him with because he never actually existed. So if there was some sort of lock just because his details didn't match precisely, I wouldn't be able to get rid of him. Unless I first changed him to perfectly match someone else. But I don't love the idea of doing that for the same reason that I don't want people changing people that are actually correct into someone else and then merging them. So who knows? Not a perfect solution for any of this, I guess.
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@redheadkelly I like your idea about a message:
"This person was created on 3 April 2020 as John Doe born on 6 Dec 1923 and married to Georgia Smith. Any edits should be to add information pertaining to this individual."
Even if the system doesn't add updates automatically as you have suggested, I think this is a great idea to put as an alert note. I'm going to adopt this for my entries!—at least those several generations back that have many descendants looking at them.
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One complicating factor with any type of automated display, message, or block based on the information originally on a profile is the fact that a large number of profiles were imported from New Family Search where they were already incorrectly combined. If the original identity in FamilySearch has John Brown's birth day, John Smith's wife, John Doe's children, and John Jones' death date because that was its final state in New Family Search, all one can do to fix this is to make an executive decision on who this profile is going to be, create three additional profiles to move information about the others to, and put on comprehensive notes as to what happened.
If the programmers create a display of original identity, then it really needs to include the alert note where an explanation of why that original identity was completely messed up could be recorded.
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@Gordon Collett what is New FamilySearch? Is that where everyone was imported from in 2012? I always assumed that import was from the old Ancestral File trees that everyone had imported years ago.
But I hear what you’re saying. No perfect system.
I have been using the Alert Note at the top of the page to add this information. Whenever I come across these situations where people have been morphed, or convoluted, and/or merged, I clean them all up and put them back to who they were originally intended to be. Then I add the name and details of the person they were intended to be to the Alert Note at the top of the page. The alert that is displayed, though, is very generic. It doesn’t give details about the person. And it relies on people actually clicking on it to read it.
Could there be a specific type of alert note that has limited characters that just allows a few details to be entered that will actually display and say.. “This person is intended to be…. Any edits should pertain to this person.”
Just a thought.0 -
New Family Search was the immediate predecessor of Family Tree. Here is the user manual for it: https://familyhistoryalive.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/new-family-search-user-guide.pdf if you are interested in looking at a few screen shots. It had some issues. The sourcing model wasn't very good. The merging process had some flaws, worst of which was that if more than 100 profiles were merged into one the system really choked (yes, there were that many duplicates and far more for some people after the Ancestral File, Pedigree Resource File, the IGI, user GEDCOMs and whatever else was used to create it were all combined.) It was only up and running for a few years and its database was the basis for Family Tree. All those 2012 imported profiles came from New Family Search which got them from those other sources.
Here is an old blog article that talks about why New Family Search was discontinued: https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/why-was-new-familysearch-org-turned-off-frequently-asked-questions
If you ever run across those cryptic Legacy NFS sources, those were all sources that were created in New Family Search. Most of them don't really have source information.
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@Gordon Collett thank you for that. I have seen those cryptic sources. It all makes sense now.
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