Time saving practices

LegacyUser

Terence Edward Taylor said: When we find names to choose to amalgamate if they match it only adds them separately and then you have to go back and delete all the information you have put in, I have spent hours every week. On occasions I have chosen to ignore and define as not a match to save my time of laborious deleting what is already there.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Terence

Surely the idea is to compare and evaluate the information on both records. In some cases the details you have inputted will be wrong, otherwise it might be the other ID that contains the incorrect detail. Spending time to, firstly, be confident the other ID is for "your" person and, secondly, to make sure you finish up with the correct detail for each vital event is essential. I regularly spend many hours (if not days) in verifying information - that's what serious genealogy involves.

Whatever you do, please do not mark a suggested duplicate as "not a match" unless you are quite sure this is true. Leave the comparison to someone who does have the time to spend - there are often no short cuts with this work.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: Please explain further what you mean. And please tell me that what you mean by being annoyed with what you call amalgamation is that when you merge John Smith born 12 March 1830 with John Smith christened 20 May 1830 you then have to go back and erase the christening date because it is wrong. If that is the case, then the two should never have been merged.

You should never have to delete information after a merge unless the merge should not have been done.

Please explain exactly what you mean before you give everyone on this board a heart attack!

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: One of the first unwritten rules of researching is do not take shortcuts.

With over 1.3 Billion names in the massive tree, make sure that when merging to profiles that they are, beyond any doubt, for the same person.

Good research takes time. A couple of years ago, I spent a full month on one profile. There were numerous problems, mostly associated with a fraudulent genealogy by Gustave Anjou.

I have to keep a close watch on that one profile to make sure that no one tries to use the Anjou genealogy as a source, or one of the subsequent genealogies that accepted the Anjou work.

More recently, I have a sometimes problem with a D.A.R. application that has been repeated over and over for one of my ancestors. The problem is that my ancestor did not live where the revolutionary fighting was taking place. The unit that he is alleged to have been part of stayed near the coast while he and his wife were having babies and raising a family in the western part of Pennsylvania.

In addition there is a couple with same or similar names who were married on the other side of the state. Since the wife was raised in Western Pennsylvania, it is extremely unlikely that they traveled across the state (there were no roads through Pennsylvania at the time just for a wedding.

I have yet another family wherein the ancestor is said to have been born to a family north of Philadelphia but they never lived in Virginia, where my ancestor and his siblings are from.

Those are just some of the issues that exist. Many families stayed in the same area and married the same families, who all used the same names repeatedly. It takes time to study and make sure that the two records for the same merge are actually for the same person. Everything needs to match: dates, places, and other family members. In addition, when there are issues, go back through the change log and make sure that every previous merge involved profiles for the same person, applying the same process to make sure these are not two different people.

Remember the unwritten rule: do not take shortcuts.