Correcting Erroneous Merges

LegacyUser

George Scott said: Erroneous merges are perhaps the greatest problem in Family Tree, not just for the genealogical data but especially for attributing temple ordinances to the correct individuals.
An erroneous merge can be reversed, as long as it is caught before any additional actions are performed on the record. But once anything more is done to the record, the erroneous merge can no longer be reversed, since the computer doesn't know which of the two restored records the additional actions pertain to. Unfortunately, the vast majority of erroneous merges aren't caught before additional actions are taken on the record, so relatively few of the erroneous merges can be reversed. That leaves many temple ordinances permanently attributed to the wrong person. It also creates the greatest frustration for diligent patrons, as separating out merged people can be extremely difficult.
So this is what I propose: Enable an erroneous merge to be reversed, even if additional actions have been taken, as long as another merge has not been performed. When the merge is being reversed, the computer would ask the patron to attribute an action to one or the other original individuals. If the patron is uncertain to whom the additional actions should be attributed, then the changes would be placed in the Source Box of the patrons who made those changes, and a message would be sent to the patron alerting him so he can make the change to the appropriate record.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: In those instances where a merge cannot be reversed, restore the merge-deleted profile. This will restore it and the associated ordinances back to what they were at the time of the merge.

All changes performed on the surviving profile will need to be manually corrected by using the Change Log and its filters.

LegacyUser

George Scott said: Tom, are you suggesting this as a possible solution, or are you saying the ability to restore the merge-deleted profile currently exists? I was not aware that this was currently possible.

LegacyUser

George Scott said: One of the problems is that we can often see that two individuals have been combined together, and in the Change History we can see a merge that might have been the cause, but we cannot see the deleted profile, so we aren't certain that this merge was the problem. So, it would be great if we could view the deleted profile before restoring it.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: The ChangeHistory lists the surviving and the deleted person. For the Merged Person that has had changes : 1. Click on the Deleted Person, 2. go to that Person and there you will see a banner saying they are deleted and you can 3. Restore Person  there.
For a Merged Person that hasn't had changes you can UnMerge "Restore" right there from the changelog. THere are some UI defects in that flow but it works.

LegacyUser

George Scott said: Joe, I've tried that before. The problem is that for the Deleted Person, only his name, birth, death and burial data are shown. Often this is erroneous data, which resulted in the erroneous Merge.

The really important information in an FT record is the family relationships, and you can't see this for the Deleted Person.

LegacyUser

George Scott said: Joe, if I may elaborate, I've been doing family history for 51 years. For a very, very long time before NFS was created, members were taught to define a person in time and space (birth and death dates and birth and death places). In contrast, NFS and FT are relationship-oriented--family relationships are more important than dates and places. But many patrons haven't learned that; they still think primarily in terms of dates and places.

So, many patrons perform merges on the primary basis of dates and places, and treat family relationships secondary, which the complete reverse of how it should be. That is complicated by the fact that patrons often confuse people with the same name and copy the birth and death data of same-named individuals from ancestry.com family trees.

That combination (erroneous birth/death data and primary emphasis on birth/death data) is the cause of many erroneous merges.

So, your advice would be terrific if we could see the full deleted record, but all we see is the birth/death data, which was often erroneous and the cause of the erroneous merge. So, without the ability to see the family members on a deleted record, Restoring a deleted record after an erroneous merge is like shooting in the dark.

After giving greater thought to my suggestion, I would scrap the suggestion and replace it with a request to be able to see the full Deleted Person.

LegacyUser

Ryan Torchia said: FS really need to suspend accounts that do things like this:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per...

(scroll down to the mass merge)

Recklessly merging everybody with the same name has to be treated like some kind of abuse. I've seen it happen a lot with common names where only the first name of the spouse is known, like a John/Richard/William Wright married to Mary/Elizabeth/Sarah .

LegacyUser

joe martel said: George. I agree. The desire is to show all the info of the deleted person. We see more info than we used to, but I agree being able to see the full info: Other Info, LifeSketch, especially Relationships, Sources, Memories would be great. There is probably some technology issues like needing to archive the deleted person's relationships, but the surviving relationships could now we now connected to the surviving person. 

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Yes, to both questions. Joe explains this below.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This is a problem. There is no way to currently see an entire "deleted" record in its entirety. I've raised this as an issue before and we have yet to have the opportunity to go in and see without restoring the record, the full record.

As to why this continues to be an issue, it may be nothing more than some additional code to open the full profile in its own tab or window and that hasn't had a high priority.

But there is a workaround and that is to use the beta site (https://beta.familysearch.org/) to restore the record. That does not impact the production site and gives us an opportunity to check the actual record.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: They only time an account is suspended if it maliciously repeatedly damages a profile or enters information that is against site policies. The open-edit concept is primary to the site and as such suspending an account seldom happens.

I looked over the change log and I sincerely hope you communicated the problems with the merges that were performed by "ADavidChristensen" and let him know that a dup is not a dup when it has significantly different birth dates than the existing record. If you did not, then the user will not know what mistake they made in performing the merges.

Communication is the key to successfully helping others (which is our responsibility as users) understand what they've done has created problems with the record and why.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I'm not sure that the information isn't archived. After all, if we can fully restore the deleted record, then the information should be coming from an archived copy made at the time of the merge.

But that is neither here nor there. The main point is that we still need to see the entire deleted record. It will take having each page of the record show a banner saying that this record is a deleted record while looking at it.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Yeah, relationships may be an issue, although the restoration would restore these to the point where the deleted record was merged.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Ryan

I can empathise with your feelings. Although few of these users are likely to be malicious, I do wonder how their minds must work. Without ever dreaming to make any checks, they have done things like merge just about every "James Young" they could find in FamilySearch (not too difficult, because these unlikely matches have appeared as "record hints").

Typically, I send a message explaining the many hours it has taken me to put things right and a common response is, "Thank you for your help!" No "sorry" or any real sign they have truly learned any lesson about how damaging / time-wasting their actions have been. Unfortunately, no sanctions will ever be introduced for actions like this. And whilst I agree with much of the content of Tom's post above, I doubt very much most of these users will ever understand the trouble they have caused.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: You can see every bit of information on the deleted person before restoring it.

Not only the information and relationships that were visible on the detail page just prior to the merge, but every bit of information. All of which should be thoroughly evaluated prior to the restore to see what you are getting into even if the programmers expand what is shown on a deleted person's detail page at some point.





Everything you need is right there in the deleted person's Change Log. I will certainly concede that that is not the most convenient format to see it in, but it contains everything that has ever been done to that deleted record, such as previous merges, so it can be properly restored not just to it's most recent pre-merge state but to its most correct state.

Less to the point, I have to take issue with the comment that in the past "members were taught to define a person in time and space (birth and death dates and birth and death places)." Much more than 50 years ago, all submission of individuals were required to be on Family Group Sheets with the person showing either as a parent in a family or child in a family. If members didn't understand that the relationships on those paper forms were a critical part of identifying that person. they kind of missed the whole point.

For example, here is an excerpt from "Lessons in Genealogy" which was published by the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1915 (click on image to enlarge if needed):



Joe, has FamilySearch ever considered directly contacting people who do strange merges to do a survey on exactly what people were thinking or trying to accomplish? It would be fascinating to see the results.

LegacyUser

Barbara Nelson said: My favorite was someone changing someone's parish, birth, death, spouse, parents and children. When I contacted them they replied that they thought something didn't seem right.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: My personal, likely incorrect, suspicion is that such merges occur either when people don't understand that possible duplicate are just possible and can easily be wrong, particularly went records have fairly sparse information and so just merge every suggestion or when people still don't understand that Family Tree is a universal tree and start doing crazy merges to clean up "their" tree by getting rid of all the people that clearly don't belong in "their" tree.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Just a quick comment on the time and space comment. There was a period of time when individual ordinance forms were used along separate couple ordinance forms. This was an attempt to make it easier to submit individuals, rather than trying to chase down all of the information needed to complete a full family group sheet. The only time FGS's were used during that period was with live ordinances. The same held true for the Temple Ready period when submissions were processed against the IGI on CDs and submitted to the temple on floppy disc.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: As Gordon has shown above all of the information on a deleted record is available if one is willing to look at the change log for the deleted record. Undoing an incorrect merge or series of merges can be a complex and sometimes tedious task. In other situations it is as simple as clicking restore on the deleted record person page. As has been pointed out earlier in this thread. if not changes have been made since the merge was completed there is a "RESTORE" in the changelog that used to be "UNMERGE". If you catch an incorrect merge early enough you can use this link to undo the merge. In this situation, the two records are returned to exactly the condition that existed before the merge.

However, as we all know frequently changes have been made to the merged record and this link in unavailable. Unfortunately changes have recently be made to help center articles which should provide guidance and they now in my opinion are misguiding the user. See --- https://www.familysearch.org/help/sal...

This article implies that you cannot undo the merge if changes have been made. That is incorrect. You can still restore any of the deleted records by finding the ID of the deleted record in the change log and going to the deleted person page. On that page there is a "Restore Person" link. Clicking that link will restore the deleted record. It will be in the condition that it was when it was merged but there may be some relationships created after the merge that stay with the restored record. So to get it in the condition it was before the merge you will need to use the change log and review all relationships connected with the record as well as sources and vital information. It can be a slow and somewhat tedious task. It also can be essentially correct depending on what other changes have been made.

Because of the variety of situations that can exist. I believe it is unlikely that any automated system will every be written to restore these records without a careful review by a human eye. Even knowing which records to restore from a record where multiple merges have occurred can be a somewhat daunting task. As an aside it used to be in new FamilySearch support had a limited team that helped patrons when complex combines had been done. This was because it was almost impossible to provide detailed instructions to users on how to make corrections. It may be time for support to consider something like that for complex merges. It is possible to undo but it is so complicated that very few individuals would feel comfortable in undertaking the task and therefore nothing gets done. Because it requires a good knowledge of at least the person record you are trying to "clean up" the process is fraught with possible errors so many are reluctant to attempt. It certainly is something where further consideration of how to resolve these issues needs to be undertaken. Additional merging will not solve the issue and the current possible duplicates only adds to the mess.

LegacyUser

Ryan Torchia said: "Abuse" may have not been the right word, but it's negligence at the very least. I wouldn't permanently suspend the account for first offenses, but I would send a notification and block editing access until the editor confirms they read it.

I think the merges I've seen were from before the additional merge warnings and requirements, so those might help. There are other possible solutions that might help prevent unwanted merges:
- An extra warning or block a merge if it results in a person having an excessive number of certain relations, like 35+ children, or four sets of parents.
- Extra warning or block if the merge is with a spouse with a birthdate more than ~80y apart, or parent/child birthdate more than ~90y apart. The dates might be inaccurate in the records, of course, but this will force people to resolve those conflicts before they can merge (or make them realize the merge is wrong).

It'd probably be good to have the duplicate suggestion algorithm check those as well.

LegacyUser

Ryan Torchia said: Be sure to check the sources and alternate names after restoring/unmerging. Those often get left attached to both records, and contribute to bad merge suggestions.

LegacyUser

Ryan Torchia said: This isn't the worst merge rat king I've seen, but at 111 attached records, it's pretty close. Plus it's been almost a year since somebody trashed it, and other editors have been pulling it apart ever since.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Interesting to think of data checks that might be done during the merge to say things like "She's already in the USA - are you sure that she's in England as well?" Or some such.