Feature to split one person into two people
I recently encountered a situation where an ancestor (Levi Wade LX38-2LW) was incorrectly attached to the family of William Wade (L89H-PGR) and Cassandra Jones (KCKQ-WWB). Although William and Cassandra may well have had a son named Levi born in Tennessee around 1799, the person described by this LX38-2LW was actually Levi Wade (K8Q1-C4B), son of James Wade (KL2Q-5FM) and Ann Magruder (KGYZ-FN6) born in Maryland in 1797. There are a number of records attesting to his details, including old genealogical sketches written while his children were still living.
Anyway, I wanted to correct this problem without disturbing the portion of the family tree deailing with William and Cassandra; whoever initially listed them as having a child named Levi probably had a good reason for doing so. I could not, however, merge him in with my Levi and change his parents to James and Ann without removing him from William and Cassandra's family entirely, so after I was done, I simply added back a new Levi to their family with all of the original details which were unique to him and not to my Levi.
No harm done, but I was a little nervous about making a mistake in recreating the details--mistakes which could be lessened in instances like this in the future if there were some sort of a "split person" feature, similar to the merge feature, but reversed. If a person is found to be an amalgamation of two persons with the same name, one could click "split person" and then slide the incorrect details away into a newly created person, just like the way they slide across during a merge, but in the opposite direction. Similarly, those details could be split off into an already exisiting person identified by the user with their ID or searched for automatically by the system based on the details selected; this would save the step of splitting into a new person and then merging that new person into an existing person (as would have had to have happened in my case).
You've probably already thought of this or had someone else suggest it to you, but if you're not already working on it, let me just give it a bump and tell you I would really like a feature like this, just in case.
Comments
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Tom Huber said: After reviewing the full Change Log for Levi Wade...
A number of merges were performed and then material added to the surviving person, making it difficult to reverse any merges.
Reverse any merges that may have occurred.
In the case or LX38-2LW
If that cannot be done, thanks to some problems with merges that may have taken place before newFamilySearch was finally disconnected from FamilySearch FamilyTree (FSFT), or because of extensive changes to the record that took place after the merge...
Open up the details page of the person you want to disconnect from the wrong family ---
Go to the Family Section of the details page.
Remove the person, whose page you have open, from the wrong set of parents... This must be done as a child of the wrong set of parents.
That gets the person out of the wrong family.
Now fully source the person and use not only sources via FamilySearch's Source Linker from FS Historical Records, but also any other site or (primary/secondary) source that contains accurate information on your relative. This is extremely important, that you fully document the person with as much information as you can. Include notes, discussions and anything else that supports your conclusions with regard to this person.
Next, send a kind message (via FamilySearch's messaging system) to the person who performed the merge or added the person to the wrong family, letting them know why what they did was incorrect (that the person they merged belonged to a different family (your relatives) and that you have removed that person from the wrong family (or reverse the merge, if that was possible).
They may or may not respond, but at least you have fully documented your relative and contacted the person who mistakenly merged the person into the wrong family.
The idea of splitting a person is incorporated into the process of reversing any merge that may have taken place. Keep in mind that prior to last summer, newFamilySearch was still connected to FSFT and as such, created a lot of problems. After it was fully disconnected (and decommissioned), then the real work of cleaning up the FSFT records could progress.
There is no "easy" solution and correcting a bad merge is a slow process that must preserve as much of the person as possible. Reversing any merge is the first step. You have already gone through a lot of process with your relative, but it appears that the problem occurred while newFamilySearch was still connected to FSFT.
Attempting to come up with a workable computer solution is, at best, fraught with problems that can make the matter worse. You do not want a computer solution to something that must be carefully examined and corrected with care. No one solution will fit all situations which is why cleaning up the FSFT records needs to be done manually on a one-by-one basis.0 -
Sean Thornton said: Thanks for the advice, Tom! I'll keep all that in mind for the next time I run into this sort of problem--hopefully by then we'll have a more rigorous peer review process for merges...0
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Cynthia Louise Van Dam said: I like Sean 's idea. I think this would not be just undoing a merge. Maybe it would just create more chaos. But he is right. If you think there is evidence for two people, it would be nice to split them and keep the appropriate sourcess, pictures dates, etc with each person.0
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Tom Huber said: I do not disagree, but I also know that a computer algorithm simply does not have the intuitive power to flawlessly and correctly perform such a split.
I have and will continue to do the following:
Detach any individual from a family to which they are not a member.
If detaching the person leaves a "hole" I will attempt to restore a merge-deleted person to the family, but only if that person is related to that family.
Otherwise, I may create and source a new individual for the family and mark that person "Not a Match" when discovered by checking duplicates from my relative.
I have done this only one time and that was for a faux New England ancestor who had been speculatively identified as a revolutionary war soldier (and subsequently removed by the D.A.R. from their index of revolutionary war soldiers). The New England individual was not my relative. The last time someone attempted to reconnect my end-of-line ancestor with a person of the same name in New England was last October.0 -
Dallin C. Wilcox said: I believe that splitting is a valuable feature in its own right, even in the case when it isn't to reverse a merge. As an example, I've run into a case of mistaken identity by someone whose search matched my ancestor, but whose ancestor was actually a similar, but distinctly different person. Take a look, you can see the entire changelog and see that there has never been a merge: https://familysearch.org/tree/person/...
My plan at this point is to search for an existing person that matches this similar person, and if I don't find it, create a new person for the similar/mistaken identity individual. Once that is done, I can then move all the children and sources over that belong to it.0 -
Brian Davis said: Maybe a feature like this could be implemented by a user interface like the merge tool: it takes all the data and you pull it left or right and then split. That way none of the data is lost, at least.
If nothing else, splitting up the sources could be handy. The details would be easier to edit once the sources got split.2 -
Justin Masters said: One reason a split would not work would be the allocation of ordinances as well.0
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Sean Thornton said: Thanks for the +1! It's funny you should comment on this now, in particular, after all these years, as I only just had another situation like this with another relative. He had been incorrectly merged and modified so many times that he was nearly unrecognizable, but I didn't notice until his parents were finally changed to the other person's parents (he was an uncle, but I only have watches on the direct ancestors). Most of the correct information was still attached along side the wrong information, but there was still no easy way to split it off. I had to create another person with the correct details, delete and recreate spouse and child relationships, detach and reattach sources, etc. It was definitely a bit of a headache.
I realize this sort of thing would be better corrected by the people using the tree being more careful and knowing what they are doing rather than by adding features to clean up their damage, but since this is a crowd-sourced tree (which I absolutely love--it's why I use FamilySearch in the first place), mistakes by beginners are just always going to happen, making mitigation the only option. Maybe a better feature would be a mandatory tutorial for new accounts that walks you through the features, maybe the first time you use each one. It could also warn about the impact your changes will make on other users--I get the impression that a lot of people on here don't know that their personal family trees are connected in with everyone else's.0 -
dbhoskisson said: I think this would be doable as all it would take is a form with the split people and us going down the list and saying what document or what relationship goes with which individual.
I have found that I spend about 60% to 75% of my research time cleaning up messes as opposed to actually finding people. This function would be a great time saver.
As for temple work, the work has been done wrong anyway. So many people do temple work without fully researching and there is so much duplicate work already done in the temples that this would be unnoticeable. I have probably cancelled twice more hours of temple work than I have created.1 -
Tom Huber said: Splitting the profile of a person into two profiles will not work.
FamilyTree is designed so that merged individuals are tracked to the surviving person. This is to accommodate one of the ecclesiastical functions of the site. If one profile was split into two, that tracking would fail.
The only solution is to restore the incorrectly merge-deleted profile and detach the surviving record from the family. Then clean up (delete/detach with reason) the surviving record of those sources and entries that apply to the restored person. The newly designed change log with its filters can help a person go through the vitals and restore the correct version that had been overwritten.
There are issues if the merge took place in the previous nFS system. Some merges were done by a team of volunteers who were not related to the profiles of the persons involved. During the project, it was found that a significant number of merges (combines as they were called at the time) were done in error. Others were, like today, done by users who did not fully review both profiles before combining them, also resulting in errors. Lacking an effective training log in the nFS system resulted in confusion over the person in the profile. FamilySearch basically inherited that mess from nFS several years ago and the FS change log does not contain the necessary information.
The only solution in those cases is to decide the person to whom the profile belongs, get that person out of the incorrect families, and create a profile with sources for the person who does belong to those families.
Regardless, splitting one profile into two will not work for FamilySearch because of the ecclesiastical needs of the site's sponsor.0 -
I wholeheartedly agree! Admittedly I am not LDS, but I have come across this problem, except the individual was not merged previously. Sources where attached and detached over many years making such a mess. I believe people want to be helpful and connect sources to the family tree, but they don't not check to see if the source makes sense for the individual they are attaching the source to. The woman I am presently reviewing sources for is listed as being married to two men, one in Wash Co TN and the other in Monroe Co KY. I find it unlikely that she is traveling back and forth and having children with these men. She is not dead in one location and alive in another.
A split feature -- evidently causing problems with "ecclesiastical needs" -- would be very helpful, genealogically speaking.
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"Ecclesiastical needs" doesn't seem like a logical reason for not implementing a feature like this. These profiles must be separated, and any way you do that is going to cause problems.
If a profile represents two or more people, either by bad merging or by people attaching records for disparate people (usually different people with the same names) that creates conflicting families, and sealing is performed for both couples/families, creating a new profile and moving one person's sources and relationships to that new profile manually will result in one profile with none of those records for one of them, and records for the separated person/family still linked to the original profile (unless they're manually cleaned up, which non-LDS members can't do).
If you do it by unmerging, the information, sources and relationships added or modified after the merge are all attached to both the merged and restored profiles. I assume sealing records behave the same way (I assume, I can't see these records, but I'm guessing from a technical standpoint they're like any other source, discussion, custom fact/event or vital info field.)
The profile separation has to occur, and those ecclesiastical records are going to get somewhat corrupted regardless of how that's accomplished, especially since non-LDS users (like me) can't see them and include them as part of any clean-up process.
That all said, a split function seems like it's be a massive development and UI effort, which doesn't seem to be this site's strength. It would be a enormous help just to improve the robustness of unmerge/restore and implementing better source moving functionality, especially for non-FS sources.
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I had the same question about splitting a person, and I understand and accept the reasons why this cannot be done. I was able to accomplish what I wanted to do by using the features here to replace a person (and creating a new person record for the non-relative). I'm in the process of moving the sources and other information to the other person which must be a manual process because it contains so many details. The process couldn't be unmerged because there was no merge; just incorrect information and relationships had been added to my relative.
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