Problems with Attachments

LegacyUser

Joseph Westra said: On Thursday, 9 Apr 2020, we had a great training meeting on Unfinished Attachments. I had previously looked at case 7379198, and had signed on as a helper for that patron, and had looked up Charles A Uhrich 1906 – August 1964 LYWQ-Y48. He had seven sources. Two of those sources had Unfinished Attachments. He had another source, for the 1910 Census. I had expected to find for that source, Unfinished Attachments, but there were none. Charles in that source was listed as a member of a different family, different parents, and different siblings. But when I clicked up on Review Attachments for that source, I can see that all of the persons on the source are attached to some people, but they are not attached to the parents in this family. All of these attached persons show up with black triangles, indicating they are attached to other people, and likely not in this family. The work you have done is remarkable, in showing Unfinished Attachments in the Source Linker. It would be nice if you were also able to flag sources that showed the black triangles. Perhaps you could have a box, similar to the one you provide for Unfinished Attachments. This box might say something like, Problems with Attachments, and then when a patron clicked on that link, you could bring up the attachments showing all the black triangles, and offer some advice that these may be duplicate records and that this source might be for a different family.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Welcome to the community support forum for FamilySearch. FamilySearch personnel read every discussion thread and may or may not respond as their time permits. We all share an active interest in using the resources of this site and as users, we have various levels of knowledge and experience and do our best to help each other with concerns, issues, and/or questions.

The black triangles only show up when the person could have the source attached, but instead, the source is attached to a different person. That person may be someone entirely unrelated or some record that is a duplicate of the existing record being sourced.

The black triangle will not show up on the record to which the source is currently attached.

The black triangle will not show up if the source has been attached to a living person, whether the source is attached to a different person or if there is a duplicate of the existing record being sourced.

Consider these triangles alerts more than anything else, that lets the user know that the record has already been attached to some other person.

The following is a good example:

In the example, the marriage record is attached to all persons, including the living spouse noted in the above image. The record is in another user's private space, so only the user who created the original record can see it. If the person dies, then that other user can enter the death date/place, and then the record will become public and at that point in time, the above screen will actually show the person in the tree (all of them in this case) to which the source has been attached.

I'm not sure that a system could detect if there were problems with attachments or not, given the way the system currently works.

But I could be wrong.