Duplicates for both spouses - which should be done first
Both Spouses have duplicates - which Spouse's duplicates should be eliminated first in order to make sure I've got the correct couple?
Answers
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@maryellenstevensbarnes1 This post was moved to Family Tree so the community can more easily answer your question. PID's may be helpful in this process. Thank you for your work in FamilySearch!
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Neither should be eliminated. The duplicates should be merged. The order of merging, whether merging duplicate husband first or duplicate wives first does not matter. Just make sure they are both the correct couple and really are duplicates before merging.
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I would say the order when merged does matter. Usually you want to merge whatever has less info or is newly created into the older record/one with more info. The reason for this is that it keeps the changelog. If someone just created a duplicate and then merges the older record into it then it erases the changelog completely and that sometimes erases valuable information/citations people left in the reason statements.
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@jaredallenjohnson1 - I don't think that was quite what @Gordon Collett meant. I think that he and I both thought that the original poster wanted to know whether they should be dealing with duplicates of Spouse 1 first or duplicates of Spouse 2 first.
Once you have decided that you are dealing with the two (say) duplicates of Spouse 2 (say), then yes, the usual way forward is to merge the newer into the older, as you suggest.
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Ya I know. I was commenting on Gordon. Probably should have mentioned him in it as it he said the order didnt matter.
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Sorry I wasn't clear. When I stated "The order of merging, whether merging duplicate husband first or duplicate wives first does not matter" I meant that is does not matter if one takes care of merging the husbands first or merging the wives first.
Regarding whether to merge husband 1 into husband 2 or husband 2 into husband 1, in the long run that really doesn't matter all that much either as the Change Logs for both profiles are always still available. It is a bit more difficult to find the Change Log for the deleted profile but it is still there. I recently had to divide one profile into the three people it really was and I was able to access the change logs of the original ten profiles without any trouble at all in order to determine who those original ten people were, sort out their information, and then restore and remerge to get the three people properly separated and documented.
In general I do agree that it is usually, but not always, best to merge the profile with less information into the profile with more information. This may have nothing to do with which profile is oldest. If there is a profile created in 2012 with minimal information and a five line change log and a profile created this year with complete information and an endless change log, I would merge the older one into the newer one.
But there are times when a Change Log is such a complicated mess of bad merges, incorrect information that has been deleted, restores, and multiple edits to correct complex problems that it can be best to get that change log hidden away on a delete profile.
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