Find "unfinished attachments" in tree
Hello Community,
how do I scan individuals in my tree for "unfinished attachments" sources?
I mean without going manually through their linked sources one by one in the person page. I have more than few thousand individuals and manually is not possible
Answers
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Not possible = extremely time expensive and therefore not worth attempting
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@guido paoluzi cusani said that doing this manually was "extremely time expensive…"
Sadly, my suspicion (and I don't know the code) is that doing it in software is equally time expensive.
As ever, the issue is what you consider to be "your tree". If the FS software checks through all your few thousand, well, it will also need to check any profiles linked to your few thousand. It won't know whether you consider those as part of "your lot" or not. It just has to check them. So we end up with a few thousand, each of which are individually linked to a few thousand, each of which is also linked to their own few thousand…
According to my "famous relatives" (yeah, sure), I am related to HM Queen Elizabeth II of the UK. Because she is Royalty, I assume that she is descended from Charlemagne, who is supposed to be the ancestor of huge numbers of present day Europeans. So my own "my tree" would go across to QE2, up to Charlemagne and down to many Europeans. Not particularly useful to have as "my tree" but true according to FamilySearch.
Nobody has yet come up with a practical means of defining what they consider to be "their tree". Or rather, there is one possibility - define "your tree" as the profiles that you are following, and only those profiles. That way it ought to be possible to modify the software to do the "unfinished attachments" check just on the profiles that you are following. That's the only way I can think of restricting "your tree" (and mine) to sensible numbers.
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i've just submitted an idea for a new topic in search assistence to highlight this. A common problem today for unfinished attachements would be a marriage source where only the groom and bride have been attached to Family tree, their parents does not exist in tree yet, and only this source could expand the tree
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Well, "my tree" could be defined "descendent only, 5 generations" and an automatic search not so computationally expensive?
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@guido paoluzi cusani suggested "Well, "my tree" could be defined "descendent only, 5 generations" and an automatic search not so computationally expensive?"
Sounds eminently sensible - it would have to be parameterised, of course, because not everyone will want those exact values but providing the parameter values have tight limits, I'd hope that would work. Certainly it's a decent suggestion which might help to make the automatic search feasible.
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Well, "my tree" could be defined "descendent only, 5 generations"
Even with seemingly tight restrictions like that the numbers could still be higher than most people realise. My 4xGgrandfather for example...
Generation 1: he had 22 children (all but one lived to adulthood). Total: 23
Generation 2: I have found 112 grandchildren, so far Total: 135
Generation 3: each of them seems to have had an average of 10 children=~1,120 Total: ~1,255
Generation 4: estimated 5 children each=~5,600. Total: ~6,855
Generation 5: estimated 5 children each=~28,000. Total: ~35,000 !!!
While this is probably unusual I'd be willing to bet it's not unique.
If such a search makes it easier to simply dismiss the Unfinished notification 'to tidy things up' that doesn't help to find those 'Visitors' in a census that really cousins, or married daughters, or grandchildren, etc.
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Colin,
A 35000 item search is, in modern computational term, nothing plus I think removing unfinished notification helps adding individuals that otherwise may get hidden. This said, my question was " does exist a way?"; answer is "no"
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In case the question was not fully understood by those who posted previously, I would like to point out that indeed it is possible to identify by individual which records are not completely matched or attached. Start by looking at the tree, choose an individual profile, click on 'sources' and in the list of sources look for those that are not "collapsed". These are highlighted by a dotted box around the optional tasks, and you would then click on 'unfinished attachments' to process the attachments.
It is true this can take a lot of time, but it is a necessary task that requires the touch of a "natural intelligence" human.
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Thanks MD. Great suggestion, natural, but slightly too time expensive. That's why I was looking for an automated search of "unfinished attachments" solution
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@guido paoluzi cusani You are correct. There is no direct "Find Unifinished Attachments" function in Family Tree.
However, and this is speculation because I have not checked this out, there may be a way to fairly efficiently find these. The Hinting engine in Family Tree is quite good. It looks at the whole cluster of information around a person including relationships to parents, spouses, and children to suggest hints. So I suspect that if one source derived from a multi-person record is attached to a person, then the other sources derived from that record have a high chance of appearing as hints. For example, if there is a birth record that has mother, father, and child in it and the source for the mother is attached to her but the sources for the father and child are not so that the mother's sources has that Unfinished Attachment notice, I would think that the source for the father would appear as a hint on his profile and the source for the child would appear the child's profile.
If this theory is correct, then the best way to take care of the majority of unfinished attachments is work through all the hints you are given either through your home page:
a descendancy chart:
or a fan chart:
These methods will only find hints for people that are already in Family Tree.
To find hints that are potentially from unfinished attachments for people that are not in Family Tree, the new AI Research Assistant on your home page may find them for you:
In summary, I suspect that by the time you finish attaching all the hints in the section of Family Tree you are most interested in, you will in addition run across and be able to attach the majority of unfinished attachements.
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Thanks Gordon,
Yes, I used hints and AI assistant a lot, that's how my tree has grown so big!!!
What worries me is the following scenario:
- let say someone left an unfinished attachment, then there is one individual in it either unlinked or non yet existing
- if the person is just unlinked someone ending up on it in a search will find an alert to link it and that is ok
- but if that person is not existing he cannot appear anywhere, still that document is already linked (except for that given individual) and so the individual is like buried… the only way to unbury it is that there is another document linking to the given individual and that may not be always the case
Additionally I fear that originally I wasn't such a source linker expert so may have left few sources unfinished and this can be happening with many people
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RE: "but if that person is not existing he cannot appear anywhere, still that document is already linked (except for that given individual) and so the individual is like buried… the only way to unbury it is that there is another document linking to the given individual and that may not be always the case."
Yes, I do run into this. Most commonly the situation I find is that someone has attached a marriage record to a bride, groom, and, for example, the brides father. But the groom's father is not in the tree and so the attachment to him is unfinished. In this case, you have to hope the AI assistant brings it up, you stumble across it accidentally or by surveying the tree, or hope that one or many of the hundreds to thousands of descendants of the groom's siblings are also working in Family Tree, comes to the family from the groom's side, and takes care of this for you.
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