What is the proper way to fix messed up person

FerencWieszt

There is a father, Matthias Wiest (GVCJ-BZR, born 1728), who has been attached to many sources incorrectly. Most of these attachments were not made by me—I initially accepted the information as it appeared. Later, during further research, I discovered another Mathias Wiest (born 1721 in the same place). Let’s call him NOID (since no person has been created for that record yet; I’m not sure how to do that, as the Source Linker doesn’t allow me to create a new person).

Currently, GVCJ-BZR is attached to two marriages (with GCD1-T2R and GVCJ-6JH) incorrectly. In reality, NOID should be the spouse in both marriages. The children and their sources (such as baptism records) are also incorrectly linked to GVCJ-BZR. The parents of GVCJ-BZR are wrongly shown as the grandparents of these children, but they are the real parent of GVCJ-BZR.

My question is: what is the recommended way to fix this situation?

Option 1:

• Remove the current parents of GVCJ-BZR.
• Correct the birth date of GVCJ-BZR
• Remove the single incorrectly attached birth/baptism record source.

Option 2:

• Remove GVCJ-BZR completely from both marriages.
• Detach all the incorrect sources (children’s baptism records, etc.).
• Create a new father (NOID) with the correct records.
• Attach NOID to both marriages.
• Reattach all baptism and burial sources of the children to NOID.

I am leaning toward Option 1, since it seems less tedious. However, because these relationships are already quite tangled, I would like to know what the recommended approach is.

Gordon Collett

One initial step in deciding what to do is to carefully look through the change log to decide who the person is supposed to be and how many different people might have gotten combined into one profile.

If you go to the Change Log by clicking Show All in the Latest Change box and filter for Merges you will see that the current Matthias is the the product of three merges:

To the right of each merge there is a View Merge which shows everything that happened during the merge. From most recent to oldest, and looking at just the first land last sections of this you will see:

3rd merge:

2nd merge:

3rd merge:

So there was originally a Matthias born in 1721 and one born in 1729. One of them was not initially created with a birth date at all. Are either of those dates correct? Could there even be three different Matthias? That will be up to you to determine. Did one really have two wives and the other one wife? Are the two Christinas the same person or different people?

If things look really confused, I would be inclined to suggest that you start by restoring the two Matthias that were deleted then carefully go through the Change Logs for those two profiles to determine who they were. Restoring will return the two Matthias that were deleted to their original states. It will not remove from the current Matthias any incorrect information that was placed on him from the merges. That you have to manually remove at some point.

Then I find it most useful to start with the youngest child, Magdolna, make sure her four merges were done correctly, make sure all her sources are correct, and get her with the right set of parents. Then work backwards through the children from there to the parents and grandparents until everything is untangled.

Jack Hern

Once again @Gordon Collett has nailed with great detail the process of dis-entangling an incorrect merge.

By using a likely pre-merge entry, by restoring the original PID - you preserve any LDS Temple work done for that person. As you have found by Gordon's display of the Change & Merge log of -BZR, there is less and less new stuff to be found, but rather a good review of sources to glean out details previously missed, or conflated (as in this example) and with many sources now side by side and reviewable as a whole the true picture for the 2 or even 3 individuals begins to show itself.

Even if not linked to sources, just about every existing entry in FS will have sources either in the FS system or on Ancestry that back up the details for said person. Now we need to link those sources to the right people.

Once you get -J2B un-merged, go through the sources and look for ones that confirm the 1721 birth date. Hopefully some will have mention of parents - so that these can be separated as well. Next I'd be looking at the marriage records and see which connect to the birthdate and/or parents previously confirmed. A consensus on the birth years on the census records may also confirm which wives belong to which Matthias. Then it will be easier to separate which kids go with which dad.

Good luck and have fun! This is the fun sleuthing and detective work of Genealogy - exciting times!

Adrian Bruce1

@FerencWieszt - My feeling is that 'BZR is currently born 1728 and should stay that way. Altering his birth to 1721 and changing his parents (which I think is what your option 1 implies) is, in effect, turning him into a different person. That can be fraught as far as the public facing data in FamilySearch FamilyTree goes, because the Latest Changes list loses its historical logic and anyone trying to read the list is liable to get confused about who the person behind this profile really is and why did the researcher do what they did…

I'm not a member of the LDS Church but I am fairly certain that this option is also liable to cause even more problems behind the scene for the LDS data - 'BZR may have been linked to his current parents and removing one lot of parents and giving him a different set, may cause issues with Church links no longer matching the external genealogical links.

As I say, I'm not a Church member, so if the chips were really down, I would go with the genealogy but I have a vague, imperfect understanding of what might cause problems and so I will try to steer clear of such strategies.

In summary (assuming I understand correctly), I believe that your option 1 may cause confusion to anyone reading the latest Changes list and may cause issues to Church data.

I would therefore go with your option 2. By coincidence, I'm wading my way through a similarly messed up family at the moment, and my advice would be to create the new 1721 Mathias (NOID as you call him) first, follow him (then you don't lose the PID) and then move the requisite stuff over to him.

From memory, things like taking 'BZR out of his current families and replacing him by NOID can actually be done in one go for each trio (father, mother and child). Similarly you will probably find it easier to go through 'BZR's sources and Review the Attachments of each source, replacing 'BZR by NOID in a series of Detach / Attach moves.

If you do it this way, I believe that it takes less time and you're less likely to lose stuff.

FerencWieszt

Thanks @Gordon Collett, @Adrian Bruce1 , @Jack Hern, for your very detailed answers. This helped me a lot. I will move forward with Gordon's recommendation, change log shows pretty clear there was a correct person already ( the one who born on 1721 died in 1766), but has been accidentally merged to a person (born in 1728), which was exactly my research results.
This is a great community, thanks again.