Merging multiple people at a time

LegacyUser

Anthony Christiansen said: It would be cool if we could merge more than just 2 people into one person. Sometimes I can find as many as 6 duplicates of the same person and it would be much easier if we could merge them all at once.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Welcome to the FamilySearch forum at GetSatisfaction.com!

I think that there are some significant reasons why this is not done and although I do not speak for FS, I suspect that they would not change this.

Merging is tricky and MANY people make mistakes. By forcing people to look at only one pair of records at a time (which can be plenty complicated when you are dealing with large families), far fewer mistakes will be made.

Another consideration is when fixing incorrect merges. I spend a LOT of time undoing damage that was caused by inappropriate merges, ESPECIALLY those where multiple merges were performed. When trying to unwind many of the messes that have been created, if I didn't have the merge by merge stepwise sequences recorded in the change history logs, it would be nigh impossible to fix. Besides the fact that modifying the system to record a single merge of multiple PIDs at once would be very problematic in software, it would make unwinding bad merges impossible. You would have to now just delete everything and all relations and then start over with new PIDs. That would result in the ordinance data being detached from the original PIDs that they were recorded on as well as the loss of the original change history for the PIDs that you are replacing.

I know that the IGI entries in the system resulted in many duplications of person records, but they will eventually disappear. However, if you are seeing many duplicates of person records that have been more recently created, You may be dealing with people who are not using the system correctly. If you go back and look at the original creation date for each of those duplicates and they were by the same person (ESPECIALLY if they were imported via GEDCOM files), you need to message that person and encourage them to stop creating duplicates.

LegacyUser

gasmodels said: While I appreciate the suggestion, I believe it would just lead to multiple mistakes. We already have an issue with incorrect merges being completed because people do not look at the details associated with the merge. Doing several at one would just compound the issue.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: One of the areas where merging more than two people at the same time can cause major problems is with families that have lived in the same geographical area and used the same family given names over and over. I have three areas in the United States where this happened. In each case, the initial families entered the area before the revolution and descendants still live there.

In one area, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, my Swiss Mennonite ancestors intermarried with the same families down through the centuries. Keeping them all straight is not an easy task and there are problems that exist in FamilySearch that I am not ready to tackle. Some research was done by professional genealogists and a cousin gathered all the traditions and compiled them, along with a list of the twenty-five Huber families that settled in what was once Lancaster County. Eventually, I should be able to straighten it all out, but only a couple of those 25 families are in FamilySearch, which means that merges are often made with the wrong people involved.

In another area, the same thing happened, but this time with two family lines again dating back to revolutionary days. Keeping both families in order, along with their descendants is a little easier, but more recent records are a problem because of a court house fire that took all but three volumes of vital records.

The third area also had early immigrants where their descendants lived (and still live today) back before the revolution. These are common names and that doesn't help matters. Clark, Newman, Huber (as common in Europe as Clark and Smith are in the United States), and one that isn't as common -- Wamsley.

Any attempts to make merging faster can very easily cause major problems with the records for these four ancestral lines of mine. That doesn't mention the families that married into my ancestral lines, again using the same given names (Biblical).

In my instance, I'm not faced with generations of members who have compiled family histories that have made their way repeatedly into FamilySearch FamilyTree. But I still run into problems with merges performed by people who are unfamiliar with my lines -- yes, they are likely also descended from the same lines, but it doesn't take much to jump to a bad conclusion as to which Abram (Abraham) is married to which Mary (Maria) who were born around the same time and had large families that also reused the same given names for their children.

So, I am just as happy as anyone that merges have to take place with only two people and their respective families.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Yes - as the comments above say, good idea until we start thinking about the risks and the problem in unwinding such a monster mash-up.