3 columns now and results thereof
3 columns is a good idea but I am now seeing "doubles"in the third column if the first column has an ancestor with no birth or death dates and you are doing a merge. A simple solution would be to NOT add in the person with no birth or death dates to the 3rd column, like it was before. Otherwise you now then have to go in and try to delete this empty birth date and death date person, which you can't, you then add in the proper birth and death dates and then merge, which is tedious. With the way it is now being set up I see people not merging anything anymore, as you have to spend time merging and the results of that, instead of researching an ancestor.
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But then you would still have to go find that profile with no birth and death dates floating alone in the database and merge it in properly. It's easier to do that if it stays attached. You don't have to add any date to merge it, just use the merge by ID function.
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Here is a perfect example of why dropping parents should not be allowed during the merge:
Some might find it tempting to just get rid of the Hans with no dates and the ?. That would leave that couple floating in the data base with no indication of who they are since they would not longer be connected to the child that identifies them. In order to not clutter the database with random, unidentifiable names, the duplicate parents must be brought over in the merge so they are not lost, and then merged with their duplicates. Not a bit of information needs to be added to either the no-info Hans or the ?. All you need to do is quickly and efficiently use Merge by ID. It will take about an additional two minutes to do this properly.
In this case "simple" is a bad practice.
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You may say that it only takes two minutes to do this. However, those of us who are frequent users, contributors, and monitors, like me, of thousands of profiles end up having to do hundreds of these needless merges every WEEK, which adds up to hours of extra work. It puts the onus on us who are monitoring the profiles, trying to clean up the endless, unnecessary duplicates. Those duplicates make it difficult for future contributors to understand the true family structure of our respective ancestors. We volunteer to do these cleanups on an ongoing basis but eventually volunteers burn out from such repetitive, disheartening work. It would be better if the system could recognize and eliminate automatically the ? profiles and the other empty profiles with no attachments or sources or notes. They are not useful in any way.
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It is still better to take minutes now when it is easy to know who these duplicates are and merge them in properly than to spend hours later, which I have had to do, trying to find out who those isolated individuals are who have been separated from the family relationships which identified who they are.
Those ? are meaningful because they usually have attached parent-child sealings and when not treated properly are a common cause of ghost parents on the ordinance page. Likewise, those "empty" profiles are most commonly IGI records which also have associated ordinances and just removing them messes up the ordinance page creating more work for people down the road to spend much more time repairing that than it takes to do things properly the first time around.
Maybe the volunteers need to be taught that they are working on improving the records of work done by diligent researchers and temple workers through past generations, respect their efforts, and treat it properly so that they know what they are doing and don't view it as drudgery.
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The empty profiles that I encounter are not from IGI records or indexed records or associated with ordinances. They are duplicates that have been created by new users, primarily from GEDCOM uploads from their private trees. These uploads contain no sources, and many of the siblings attached in a family are created with simply a name and no vital information. When people do one GEDCOM upload, there can be multiple generations of duplicates loaded onto the FamilySearch tree (I have seen up to six generations worth). There can be hundreds of duplicates created from one upload. It can take an entire day to comb through each generation, looking at the spouses and their parents and their children and so on to try to catch all the duplicates that were created from one upload. New users tend not to understand that they have created those multiple generations of duplicates when they do an upload. These duplicates are not useful or helpful for any of us.
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@vNatale We are currently looking at reducing the number of duplicates coming from GEDCOM uploads. I'm not sure the timeline yet, but we are very aware of this problem and the headaches it's causing.
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