Repeated sources in Source tab
I've seen this in multiple records and would like advice on the best way to fix it going forward when I see it. In many records, I see the exact same source listed multiple times. When I compare the "photo" (if there is one) of the source, it is the exact same page of a microfiche or book page, but sometimes the FamilySearch URL to the source is different.
In the case below, I discovered today that after a merge someone did in the beginning of March, the same source is listed numerous times, in most cases tagged to the same attribute on the profile.
What is the best practice for fixing things like this when I find them?
Thanks in advance
Answers
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Perhaps not the answer you wanted to hear, but when I review profiles before merging and find that the same source is attached to one or more of those profiles, I edit the profiles before I merge. I detach the source from the profile(s) that will be merged away.
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I keep all "duplicate" sources when performing a merge. I don't have a citation for that being a "best practice", but that's what I do.
That said, I think that some mechanism for merging or grouping redundant sources would be a nice feature to have. There are various levels of that:
- It is possible for two people working on two profiles that represent the same person before a merge to use "attach to tree" for the same image. Both sources come along in the merge. That's pretty rare in practice, however, and in such a case I think it's appropriate to note that two different researchers (or one researcher working at different times) made the same conclusion about the same subject.
- Sometimes, due to multiple indexing projects or some one-time event of mass reprocessing, most people on a film will have two sources (or more). In a common case, one is linked to an image "near" the actual one or even to the film as a whole and is transcribed with regularized spelling of names, while another is linked to the actual image and with exactly "what is written". Once again, it adds value to note the multiple conclusions about the subject.
- Sometimes the same book was filmed more than once; for example, the book of christenings from 1901 to 1905 in Cuautitlan, State of Mexico, Mexico, was filmed in 1964 and is available starting with image 358 of DGS 004596060 and again in 2003, hence also available starting with image 133 of DGS 004595118.
- Sometimes the photographer took an image of the same page mutiple times in the same project. Where there were duplicate images following each other in the sequence of images, indexers were supposed to index only first and mark subsequest ones as "Duplicate", but sometimes the photographer (or subsequent postprocessing) jumped back farther, or the indexer may have missed the duplication becuase it crossed a batch boundary.
- Sometimes multiple documents relating to the same person appear on the same film in the same project. For example, in parish records as well as civil records from the town in Mexico I mentioned above, most married couples produced two records, an "información" or "presentación" by the intended parties a few weeks before the wedding (for church records, to allow time for the readings of the banns) and then a separate entry for the wedding itself. Sometimes the "presentación" bears a cross-reference to the wedding-register, including the wedding-date, and sometimes that has been taken as the date of the source. For the majority of the time available the "presentaciones" are in loose-leaf form, on separate films with separate DGS numbers, but there are a couple of volumes in the mid 18th century where the "presentaciones" are in the first part of the book and the wedding-records are in the second part of the book. And in the civil records both events were recorded in the same book, in chronological order, so they were typically separated by a few entries, across fewer images.
- And another sort of "duplicate" is some sort of copy or transcript of the same original source. For example, for one of my close deceased relatives we've attached a scanned image of a black-and-white Xerox of their birth certificate, and also a color photograph of a different copy. And I don't have the link handy, but there's a set of records in Mexico City where the original documents have been filmed and handwritten word-for-word transcripts copied the same year they were made and kept in a separate place have also been filmed.
Perhaps you could edit the titles of some of the sources to start with "DUPLICATE" or otherwise better distinguish exactly how they relate to the person.
My concern with detaching a source is that it'll still be searchable, but harder to relate back to the profile. But if there's a case where it appears there are a large number of links from the same profile to the same exact source (dozens or hundreds, not just the half-dozen you've shown here), perhaps you can ask FamilySearch Support to clean them up internally.
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@Tim53946 - can I attempt to summarise the issue of repeated / duplicate sources?
TLDR - remove duplicate URLs and leave the rest.
Expanded - There are roughly 3 different types of repeat / duplicate and only one counts as a genuine duplicate in FamilySearch.
- There may be 2 (or more) different paper etc records created in real life of the same physical event. These are not duplicates in FS terms.
- There may be 2 or more source index records referring to the same paper record (eg it's been filmed or indexed twice). These are also not duplicates in FS terms.
- There may be 2 or more attachments to the same person profile that point to the same source index record URL. These are the only "proper" duplicates in FS terms.
I see from your original post that you are familiar with looking for duplicate URLs. Good
My view is that only category 3 should be fixed - everything else should be left. Unless I'm missing something, cat 3 sources (duplicate URLs) can be fixed by detaching the extraneous source index records one at a time, making sure that you have the URL visible each time.
Why do I recommend leaving extraneous Cat 1 and Cat 2 ? Because each of those is a source record in its own right, the system cannot tell that there is any duplication and if you remove them, the system will almost certainly realise that the source index record is unattached and may end up hinting that it should be attached - perhaps to the profile that it was detached from, perhaps to another profile that might not be the right human being.
Further to the above, there is a special case of Cat 2 where FamilySearch software decided that source index record X was a redundant version of source index record Y and it recommends X be detached and replaced by Y. You can probably guess the issue - in too many cases X contains more information in the index data than its purported replacement Y. Again, leave it attached, I advise.
Okay, I see that I've done my usual trick of writing a long summary, but that's my belief about best practice.
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I have basically the same question. The US Census exists in 4-5 different places, (Family Search, Ancestry, Fold3, My Heritage etc.) Once a Census is attached to an individual or family from one website, what is the purpose of addit it again from another website?
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@Eugene Breindel asked: "… Once a Census is attached to an individual or family from one website, what is the purpose of adding it again from another website?"
None whatsoever - in fact if I find such an external attachment that duplicates a FamilySearch source, I will remove it.
Caveat - this only applies if the two source are identical.
External attachments are there to cope with cases where an external (i.e. non-FS) site has an index record or image that isn't on FS. As FS extends its coverage, you may come across instances where the external source was added well before the FS source was created and in that case both the (old) external source and the (newer) FS source may end up attached. In such a case, providing I have the time, I will remove the external one.
When removing an external source, make sure there aren't valuable notes that might be lost in a removal. If there are, then consider copying them to another note somewhere else on that profile.
By the way - the external and FS sources are not considered to be duplicates in the context of this thread, since they point to entirely different images / records - one on an external site, one on FS.
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