Removing ? names
I have come across a few instances where Family Search has added a spouse and just used ? as the name. Often this has been from a death record where it is assumed that the person had a spouse but none is named. If it was a child who died or someone that was known to not have married, is there a way to remove the ? person? They could be unlinked but would still be floating around. An example of this is J35W-K1G. Any thoughts?
Thanks Wendy
Answers
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@WendyWalmsley that example is really annoying, isn't it, especially given his early death in WW1. I'd be tempted to merge the offending ? profile into his profile without changing the latter and with a suitable reason statement, just to get rid of the ? profiie, unless there's any clue anywhere that he was married at all (can't see one anywhere, though may have missed something - and a previous contributor has removed a Marriage event, specifying a reason statement of 'unmd', I see).
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The help article Why does a person's name have a question mark in Family Tree? explains how the question mark came to be added ten years ago, as well as the recommended course of action.
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The example profile provided was for Christopher Gordon Horsman (registered birth name). At school and later, he was known as Gordon (or Gordon Christopher). As @MandyShaw1 says, a user has removed the couple relationship with the "unmd" date.
Gordon's brother, Arthur, is similar in that his profile also had a "?" wife with a date of "unmd". That relationship was completely removed in 2021.
Arthur and Gordon died within the space of a day in the battle of the Somme. Neither appears to have left any trace of a wife. Both their enlistment records record their father as the next of kin, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records list only the parents. Both profiles appear to have been originally loaded on 15 April 2012 from IGI batches which had the "?, unmd" wives.
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@Alan E. Brown said:
The help article Why does a person's name have a question mark in Family Tree? explains how the question mark came to be added …
For completeness sake, I think that there is another possibility, though it doesn't seem to apply here, when some UK Parish Registers (and ?) were indexed with placeholder entries for unmentioned mothers and spouses.
- Older UK baptisms were recorded with the names of the father (only) and the child. In a small but annoying number of cases, a placeholder entry for the mother was indexed, even though the mother was not mentioned in the baptism. The mother was given a name of "?"
- Some other PR entries (again a small but annoying number) indexed a placeholder entry for a spouse named "?" even though the spouse was not mentioned. In the most offensive cases infants were being buried but the burial index had a placeholder entry for their spouse.
I have seen these placeholder entries make it through to FS FamilyTree and when that happens, I have gone back to the index record and edited the index to remove the "?" placeholder. I actually don't remember how I dealt with the "?" profiles.
Slightly less annoying is when I pick up a non-attached index record with a "?" placeholder in it. I use the Source Linker but ignore the "?" lines. I then edit the index to remove the "?" placeholders - otherwise the system will just nag the next person to create a profile for them.
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This is a different situation than what I have ever run into. I usually work in Norwegian parish registers. In these, the mother's name was usually not recorded before 1816. Extracted records that went through the IGI do have associated ordinance data but just have the child and the father. The import into Family Tree in 2012 from the IGI will have the child's name, father's name, and ? for the mother due to programming requirements. A child always has a mother so in this case the ? should just be left alone until the mother can be identified from census, marriage, death, or other records and the ? can be changed to her name.
In this situation in which the ? stands for a wife who can be proven to have never existed, it does sound like the profile should be gotten rid of. I think I would agree with deleting the couple relationship then merging the ? into the man with a good reason statement.
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