Minor Design Improvement: Merging
LegacyUser
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Gordon Collett said: 
I ran across a family tonight that needed a lot of cleaning up. They had thirteen children. Most of the children had two extraction derived records and two different people had submitted this family to FamilySearch in past years. One had all the children, one had about half of the family.
It took 40 merges to combine all the copies of parents into just one record each. I have 21 more merges to do to get all the copies of the children combined to one of each. The merges actually went very smoothly with the new routine and I do like it better than the old one. Having all relationships carried over automatically actually made it seem to go faster than the old merge routine because I didn't have to check so carefully that I hadn't missed any. Thank you for this nice improvement.
Also, thank you for leaving the final result of the merge on page 3 on the right hand side of the page. I think I would have been feeling very disoriented after having it bounce to the left, as it originally did, forty times.
I do have one request that would make the process seem even smoother. Page three of the merge is where we see the final results and have the reason statement box. To complete the merge we have to enter that reason statement. Since most of the time, there will be nothing else to do but that, please have that reason statement text entry box active with a blinking cursor as soon as the page loads so that we do not have to click into the box every time but can rather immediately start typing.
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As a side note to the curious: I did the merges by first doing all 20 merges for the father of the family. After ten merges, I started getting this warning:
by this time there were ten copies of his wife attached to him so I suspect that is what triggered this.
After twelve merges, I started getting this warning:
So that appears to be the cut off for a person having many merges.
I ran across a family tonight that needed a lot of cleaning up. They had thirteen children. Most of the children had two extraction derived records and two different people had submitted this family to FamilySearch in past years. One had all the children, one had about half of the family.
It took 40 merges to combine all the copies of parents into just one record each. I have 21 more merges to do to get all the copies of the children combined to one of each. The merges actually went very smoothly with the new routine and I do like it better than the old one. Having all relationships carried over automatically actually made it seem to go faster than the old merge routine because I didn't have to check so carefully that I hadn't missed any. Thank you for this nice improvement.
Also, thank you for leaving the final result of the merge on page 3 on the right hand side of the page. I think I would have been feeling very disoriented after having it bounce to the left, as it originally did, forty times.
I do have one request that would make the process seem even smoother. Page three of the merge is where we see the final results and have the reason statement box. To complete the merge we have to enter that reason statement. Since most of the time, there will be nothing else to do but that, please have that reason statement text entry box active with a blinking cursor as soon as the page loads so that we do not have to click into the box every time but can rather immediately start typing.
*****
As a side note to the curious: I did the merges by first doing all 20 merges for the father of the family. After ten merges, I started getting this warning:
by this time there were ten copies of his wife attached to him so I suspect that is what triggered this.
After twelve merges, I started getting this warning:
So that appears to be the cut off for a person having many merges.
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Comments
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Adrian Bruce said: As a (possibly expected) member of "the curious", I shall bear your latter two warnings in mind. I have no real idea whether I would merge all the fathers first, leaving the wives separate, or do it a bit at a time to keep family sizes down. The answer is probably - either.
The 2nd warning seems sensible - it's kinda like "Here Be Dragons..." Mind you, I can think of a few other circumstances where such a warning would be meritted, such as people having children on alternate sides of the Atlantic. In fact, as a simple warning, "Use extra care to make sure that they really did emigrate" might have merit in all cases of emigration. An interesting thought...0 -
Gordon Collett said: At his last couple of Q&A sessions, Ron Tanner did mention that more warnings are in progress, specifically those to do with places. Such as marking when events on the person are more than ten miles apart.0
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Adrian Bruce said: Ooh - 10 miles warning sounds interesting.0
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Gordon Collett said: Yeah, you'd have to listen to him because I won't get this right, but he mentioned that as recent as the mid-1800's (I think) something like 90% (I think, was working on other things and listening at the same time) of people never went more than 3 miles from where they were born.
He's been having trouble with Facebook so these Q&A sessions are held on his YouTube channel. He talked about the new merge on both of the two most recent ones which are at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iULgQ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qyvF...0 -
Paul said: It's a shame the same position is not adopted when presenting the ridiculous suggestions of possible duplicates that leads to inexperienced users trying to complete merges on them all! Stop the ones appearing that suggest a match for a person who was born 3,000 miles away and there would be no need to bother so much about the (far more feasible) ones that are, say, for individuals who lived / were born 10-20 miles from the inputted location.0
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Paul said: Please don't take the above remarks as my not appreciating the warnings that are now being presented at the start of, or during the merging process. Anything that might deter the truly awful merges I encounter every week is really welcomed.0
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Adrian Bruce said: Quite agree that this distance warning would be useful in several places!0
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Adrian Bruce said: Gordon - it's a well known fact in the UK as well, that many / most people lived and worked in an area bounded by the nearest market towns - certainly agricultural workers would go no further to hire out.
Having said that, my 6G-GF went from the banks of the River Tyne in the NE of England in the mid-1700s to London and then to Bristol. So it happens - just only for a small percentage.0 -
Gordon Collett said: Paul, in one of the presentations I put the links in for about, Ron also talked about how he would like to see the hints and possible duplicates really tightened up and to get rid of just as many obviously incorrect ones as they can. So FamilySearch is aware of the problems the current routines have and also wants to do something about the situation.0
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Paul said: Thanks for advising me of this, Gordon. As I should have done earlier, I'll now take a look at those presentations.0
This discussion has been closed.