US1910Project
Answers
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But the profile at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/GRD4-LZR is of an individual who appears not to be connected to Family Tree itself. I have not seen a profile along these lines and wonder if anyone can explain how it has been created without it being properly connected to FT?
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@Paul W There have been a couple of threads today from people who noticed strange results after a merge. I wondered if there might be a problem with the new Labs Project for Merge Analysis?
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I merged the profile after I posted about it. I wasn't just going to leave a duplicate up. It should show as a "deleted person"; the change history links to the merge target.
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Yes - as soon as we are again able to post screenshots the better! Indeed, this does show up in the change log as a deleted person, so - as Áine suggests - there appears to be a problem with the merging process at the moment (whereby the fact this ID has been deleted this information is not finding its way to the Profile page).
Sorry that I have digressed from the important point you are raising, as I feel very strongly about any continuance of these census projects. I agree they should not be allowed to connect to Family Tree, not only because they are creating duplicates but because they are adding detail to Family Tree that has not been corroborated, thus causing the creation of inaccurate and misleading profiles.
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I see the main post you must be referring to is
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@Paul W And when I mentioned that thread, in the Merge Analysis group, another user mentioned a similar problem.
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Oh, I now see (after joining the group!) your subsequent post:
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And there are several other threads concerning issues that may be related.
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The Deleted Banner Missing bug seems to have been fixed. Thanks for reporting. If you have other examples of Merge not working correctly a new thread might help, vs putting in this old 1910 Census thread. And thanks @JD Cowell for letting me know how you come across the duplicates. If there was an easier way to surface those I would love to see it.
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My suggestion would be to do some sort of bulk analysis on profiles created by the various projects. It's been several years: do you have the data on what percentage of profiles continue to exist vs. being merged elsewhere? You might be able to pick up on patterns (what factors are common to profiles that have been merged, for instance), but that is probably only really possible to do in bulk, and I don't think anyone else would have the tools to do this.
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Actually, here's one that should help going forward: Have people look at the record images and use their best interpretation of what is written on the record, rather than blindly use the automated transcription. Auto-hinting for duplicates works a lot better when the name is accurate, and when names get created with asterisks or obvious mistranscriptions, it's likely to not trigger at all. (Asterisks shouldn't even be in names. It creates an error.)
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I have been seeing multiple, multiple instances of this when attaching hints to records through Record Linking Lab. For example, Bartolo DeMarto here shows up as deleted because he was a duplicated person, but there is nothing indicating who he was merged with. There are TWO profiles for him — here and here — but neither profile's changelog indicates a merge with anyone, nor were the 1900 and 1910 census records from the now-deleted profile attached to either record.
I've come across this at least 20-plus times.
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From a quick glance at GN96-4V7, it looks like the profile was deleted without a merge, which is only possible when only one user has made edits. Very strange that the account would delete rather than merge when a known duplicate was identified…
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@JD Cowell Yes, the same user that created -4V7 in Sep 2022, did the delete in 2023, probably when they noticed there were duplicates. If I make a mistake of adding a duplicate, and it has nothing better than the original PID, I do a Delete, because I think Merges can obscure or make things look more complicated. I'll check out @AlexisVictoria in a bit. Thanks for all your helpful info.
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@JD Cowell @AlexisVictoria In looking at the two other PIDs the USCensusProject shows up as the contributor adding the PID in 2022, and then did the delete in May 2023 as well. As mentioned further up the thread these are contributor names associated with BYU RLL. I don't know how they determined what names to delete after they added them.
The Source that was attached is now unattached to anyone in the Tree. So maybe some of these were deleted in error, or are you finding the duplicates (which is the Reason cited by USCensusProject for the delete).
I'm curious as to how you come across so many of these?
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@joemartel … I'm not sure what happened there, but I'm finding them VERY frequently when reviewing hits through the Record Linking Lab.
I just did five "Quick Hints" as a test; of those, four out of five were hints for now-deleted people :
GCGS-CJZ (record is not attached to anyone, nor could I find this person anywhere in the tree)
GCBB-N8M (same)
GCPS-P2Z (same)
GCG7-8J2 (person was in tree, but the record was not attached)0 -
What are Quick Hints? Can you give me a URL, screen shot….? @AlexisVictoria
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@joemartel We haven't been able to attach screenshots for several months. If you could find the team that is fixing that and remind them we've been waiting patiently?
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@joemartel , quick hints are part of the Record Linking Lab project; the link is here. You can review a hint, and determine whether or not it goes with the suggested person in the tree.
However, while the hints are generally good, many of the people they are suggested for are now deleted as duplicates … but record was never linked to anyone (as it should be if people were merged). I'm just trying to figure out why it appears that a huge number of people were deleted as "duplicates" but cannot be found anywhere in the tree.
Here's a screenshot of one:
As you can see by going to the detail page for Ema Jones, the reason I can't attach the hint to her in the tree, since she was deleted as a duplicate. However, I can't find her or any other members of her family anywhere in the tree, and the record isn't attached to anyone either.
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@Áine Ní Donnghaile — just discovered that you can upload a file to a site like Imgur and attach the link … will show up as a screenshot!
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that is a byu tool and I don’t know why it is serving up bad info. You’ll have to contact them. I’d be interested in what is happening. Thanks. @AlexisVictoria
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Yes, Alexis, I know we can use external sites, but that is not the point. We WERE able to post screenshots here, but the option is broken and supposedly with the engineers. I know they are busy, but 4 months?
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Yes, I understand that it's a BYU tool. But I think that's beside the point. The major issue is that:
- Many, many profiles are being deleted as duplicates when no duplicate actually exists;
- When a duplicate DOES exist, no one is attaching those sources to the existing person before deleting the duplicate; and
- This invariably seems to be happening where the USCensusProject was both the creator and deleter.
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USCensusProject is the same BYU contributor and I don't know why they are doing what they are doing.
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Oddly, I've also noticed that many people are deleted MONTHS after initial creation … which seems odd.
Does anyone know who is behind the project?0 -
I have been consistently running into profiles that have been created by users with usernames like "treebuilder/helper". I wonder if they are part of the same ill conceived BYU project. They have been creating profiles for potentially living individuals, adding bad data, creating duplicates, among all the other bad actor types of activities.
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I agree that merges can make things complicated. This is the primary objection that most of the commenters in this thread have had to the various census projects. They are almost invariably creating duplicates of already-existing people, and it's a massive pain for everyone involved to merge the duplicates, and it leaves a complicated edit history trail behind.
The flip answer is, I'm coming across so many duplicates because these projects have been creating thousands (or more) duplicates over the past 4+ years, so there are a lot to find.
More to your point: I come from a large Southern family, so I have a lot of cousins, and I'm pretty thorough in my research. When I am studying a person, I generally try to find each census record that person appears on, and attach it. I also tend to do a cursory scan of cousins' spouses' trees, to make sure that those people are not also related to me or to other cousins' spouses (which happens a lot on certain branches of my tree). If I see a person who has no census records attached, I'll go looking for them on FS. When I find those census records are already attached to people in the tree, this usually leads me to swear, sigh, and resign myself to a fit of merging Census Project duplicates. It's a very frequent occurrence.
I would argue that anyone who spends a moderate amount of time researching relatives on FamilySearch who lived in the United States in the first half of the 20th century will run into Census Project duplicates before long. There are just too many of them out there. A possible exception would be people who come from families who were already well-linked with FamilySearch sources before these projects started. (My direct ancestral lines were pretty well linked, so I didn't really have this issue with them.)
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And those we cleaned up from the Census Project a few months ago now must be fixed again because of the Tree Helper and Tree Building projects. A widowed woman with 1 son, living in Philadelphia, should not be confused with a married woman, with a different given name, with 4 children in Allentown, in the same census year. But, a Tree Helper did just that so I've spent another day cleaning up that family, again.
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