Productivity Enhancement: Merging tree
When merging I notice that often there are other relationships on a small tree that I have to manually keep track off and merge at the same time I am merging one individual in the tree. It would be helpful to have a tree merge feature where I can merge all the members at once so I don't need to tediously come in an find the other family members and merge them too.
Comments
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Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it :-), finding duplicates in the one single FS FamilyTree frequently exposes duplicate family segments as well. This is good because that exposure helps to clean up duplicates in the database. Unfortunately, once you commit to merging a member of a family, you now have to commit to examining all of the others in the family as well.
The frequency and damage done by people incorrectly merging individual records together is really significant. Having a single "family merge" type function would seriously compound those errors. Often one of the families involved is a "hybrid" due to parents being previously merged incorrectly. Without examining all those family members individually first, doing some kind of "batch merge" would produce untold damage that NOBODY would really want to attempt to fix do to it's complexity. Adding that type of visibility in a single tool would be really problematic.
I do sympathize with this though. There have been times when I've had to perform as many as 40 merges in an hour (frequently from records pulled from the IGI). Fortunately, because I was forced to do them one at a time, I have been able to spot inconsistencies during the process and unwind any mistakes I've made more easily. Otherwise those inconsistencies would have been buried in incorrect combining and would have been very difficult to spot and undo.
BTW, When I find I'm in the process of merging 2 groups (i.e., family segments) together, I have discovered that If you try to start with the parents of the segments first, it is easier to follow the children duplicates when fixing them. For example, when birth dates are present the children duplicates will group together in the family members display when the parents were merged. There seem to be some other advantages of approaching it this way too.
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Merging one by one is tedious but is the safest way to make sure things are checked carefully. Merging can be difficult with one person, adding more at the same time would multiply the problems and make it harder when you need to unmerge and untangle bad merges.
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Jerry
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As already has been proffered by 'Jeff' and 'Cindy' ...
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In regard to your suggestion of a "Batch"/"Bulk" FAMILY "Merge"/"Combine" ...
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I am sorry ...
But ...
A "Big" NO ...
NO THANKYOU ...
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Certainly, not always intentionally ...
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But, MANY Users/Patrons DO NOT do their "Due Diligence" BEFORE even doing a "Merge"/"Combine" for an individual/person, let alone a doing one for a Family.
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'Perish the thought' ...
What a mess would it create ...
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As, many Users/Patrons DO NOT have the EXPERIENCE in "Genealogy" ...
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BEFORE any "Merge'/"Combine" is undertaken (ie. attempted), then ...
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One "Should" ALWAYS do their "Due Diligence", fully investigating BOTH the individuals/persons, separately; before, deciding if the "Merge"/"Combine" should even go ahead.
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Having the ability for a "Batch"/"Bulk" FAMILY "Merge'/"Combine" would ONLY compound any possible "Errors"; and, in fact, WOULD definitely "Increase" the likelihood of "Errors".
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Trying to 'unravel' an INCORRECT "Merge"/"Combine" of an individual/person can be a 'nightmare' in itself.
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Trying to 'unravel' an INCORRECT "Merge"/"Combine" of an entire FAMILY. is 'beyond disbelief'.
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I can attest to that ...
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It took me Two (x2) 'solid' Weeks to Unmerge/Uncombine two Families INCORRECTY "Merged"/"Combined", partly due to the LATER work.
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The Families almost had identical names; ages; birth location (county); and, lived very close by - they were merged/combined due to some Census'.
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Furthermore ...
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"Genealogy"/"Family History" is NOT a "Sprint" ...
"Genealogy"/"Family History" is a "Marathon" ...
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Take your time ...
Do it properly ...
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QUALITY, over "Quantity" ...
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Just my thoughts.
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Brett
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ps: Sorry ...
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Thank you for your comments. I do support all your statements. However, I do think there is the potential of a feature that would assist in. For example, maybe it is simply when doing a merge tree it simply adds all the matches into a Queue that you then go through one at a time, doing your due diligence to make sure they are good matches. Then you have a working queue that you can click on the next item, do the research and then perform the merge. My issue is when looking at something that does need to merge, I then want to merge a parent, then a child, etc. If it simply put both of these id's in a queue that I could refer to and then merge from.
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It might be oldfashioned and take longer than creating a list on the computer, but I keep a spiral notebook to write down such things. I title the page "Possible Duplicates" Then write the name, ID#. If there is a family situation, as you have described, I put the parent name first and the children's names, each on a separate line. I draw a bracket line in the margin with a note that these people are related. I usually only do this if I'm not going to be able to complete all the merges in one sitting.
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