Tree search returning deleted profiles and spurious relationships
Here is a search that I have just done. It is a search for the late Queen Elizabeth II. My search preferences include "All Information" and I have filtered the search to include only the FamilySearch Family Tree collection. The result list is showing several profiles for the same person. In particular, these are unusual:
- G71M-BYY. The search list is displaying five "Parents", two of which are the correct ones; the others are spurious. It is also displaying about 41 "Others", most of which are spurious and bizarre. The profile itself is fine; there are two parents and seven Other Relationships (mostly godparents).
- P6KY-TRC. This is a deleted profile.
- P62J-GC2. This is a deleted profile.
My questions are:
- Why are deleted profiles being included in the search results?
- Where do the spurious relationships come from?
I think that these two behaviours are related. The profile has been merged many, many times (my rough count is over 400), and I am guessing that the spurious relationships are appearing as a result of the search display not excluding relationships with deleted profiles.
For those who are interested in the Search URL, here it is:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/tree/results?count=20&q.birthLikeDate.exact=on&q.birthLikeDate.from=1926&q.birthLikeDate.to=1926&q.birthLikePlace=England%2C%20United%20Kingdom&q.deathLikeDate.exact=on&q.deathLikeDate.from=2022&q.deathLikeDate.to=2022&q.deathLikePlace=England%2C%20United%20Kingdom&q.givenName=elizabeth&q.surname=windsor&c.collectionId=on&f.collectionId=0
Answers
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@JulianBrown38
I can't speak to your comment about spurious relationships, but I think search returning deleted profiles is working as designed.A deleted profile never really disappears; it's always there for us to view and restore if warranted.
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I've done many searches, and I've never seen deleted profiles returned among the results. There are many profiles that have had multiple matching profiles merged into them, which process has created many matching profiles that are in a deleted state. Yes, they're never completely gone, but if deleted profiles were candidates to be returned in a search, we would see those many deleted profiles returned among the results all the time when we search. Yet I never see them. I've just tried several searches for profiles that I know have many associated deleted profiles via merge, and in none of those cases have I seen a deleted profile among the search results — neither as entries in the search results, nor as related persons within an entry.
@Áine.ní.Donnghaile , if you are able to produce similar results by searching for a different profile that produces deleted profiles among the search results, it would be helpful to have those specifics.
So I think that @JulianBrown38 is correct that what was returned in that search is quite unusual and feels like a bug. It is rather mysterious to me why that Queen Elizabeth II profile produces those unusual search results, since it seems to be so difficult to duplicate such results with other searches.
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@Áine.ní.Donnghaile @Alan E. Brown Thanks for responding.
With regard to deleted profiles, the only place where I have seen them appear unexpectedly is in the Cemetery Search. In that case, deleted profiles can be included in the list of burials in a cemetery. Those appear to have been caused by one of a couple of bugs that were in the initial implementation of the cemetery search; when a profile in the cemetery list was deleted as a result of a merge, the deleted profile in the cemetery search database was not replaced by the surviving profile. (The other similar bug related to the cemetery search database not being updated when a profile's name was changed.) Both of those bugs persisted for a considerable period but were eventually fixed; however, no remedial action appears to have been done to fix the incorrect data in either case. I'm not aware of any other place (apart from, for example, the change log) where deleted profiles can appear unbidden.
With regard to the spurious relationships reported by the tree search, I've just looked at all the 37 purportedly-related profiles which do not appear in the profile of Queen Elizabeth II as "Other" relationships; that is the overwhelming majority. With all but a handful of those profiles, none of them has any existing "Other" relationships. Some of the profiles are extremely simple; just the basics of creating a profile; add name, sex and birth, and mark as deceased. Most of these profiles have been most-recently-updated since about mid-2024.
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@JulianBrown38 Your issue has been escalated and is being reviewed by the appropriate department. They may reach out to you if further information is needed. Thank you for reporting.
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