Research Help: Attach Source Already Attached
Looking at Wilson Jennings Lamoreaux LWYL-MHZ there is a Research Help, the 1850 census. But it's already attached to a different dossier.
Following the Research Help to Review and Attach, takes me to the Source Linker screen. Wilson is attached; but Thomas, Sarah, Olive, Norman, William H, and Elizabeth are ALL IN LIMBO apparently.
Looking at Wilson J Lameraux GZVL-C9Q, sources tab, the first source is the 1850 census. Reviewing attachements takes me to the Source Linker, where Thomas, Sarah, Olive, Norman, Wilson, William H, and Elizabeth are ALL ATTACHED.
Choosing "View: Record" from either Source Linker screen takes me to the identical same screen showing the indexed record and the image if I want to see it. It's not a case of two different Indexing projects.
I am carefully considering whether LWYL-MHZ and GZVL-C9Q should be merged so don't somebody jump on that, there are some caveats. For one thing, this discussion will get a little hard to follow.
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What is your question here? If you decide that these two individual records LWYL-MHZ and GZVL-C9Q are indeed the same person, the simplest thing to do is to merge them. That will bring all the attached sources for both of them attached to the remaining person.
If this isn't the question that you have, what is it that you are asking?
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My question is, Does this seem right? A source is attached to a family, and FS suggests it should maybe also be attached to this other family? It does not suggest they be merged.
It's a bug, an error in the system. I'm seeing lots of instances of it occuring. I can provide more examples if requested.
As I said, I am not rushing to merge them because someone might want to investigate the problem here and merging them now would contaminate the crime scene, so to speak.
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The hinting system ignores whether a source is already attached to another person in Family Tree. This is neither a bug nor an error. It is a very important feature because none of us users never make a mistake.
Here are the three possible situations you will run into and the actions to take for each when you find a hint to attach a source on Person A and find it already attached to Person B:
1) The hint on Person A is wrong and the source has nothing to do with Person A. The source is correctly attached to Person B. In this case, mark the hint as "Not-A-Match" against Person A and leave it attached to Person B.
2) The hint on Person A is correct and the source should never have been attached to Person B. In this case, attach the source to Person A and detach it from Person B. Most likely Person B will now have a hint pop up for that source so go to Person B's page and mark the hint as "Not-A-Match."
3) The hint on Person A is correct and it is correctly attached to Person B because they are duplicates. This is actually a handy way to find duplicates that the Possible Duplicates routine missed. In this case, merge Person A and Person B.
In the situation you have here, you have a bit of research to do because the one Wilson in Family Tree is there as a husband and father with wife and children, but no parents and the other Wilson is in Family Tree just as a child with parents. Is Wilson the husband/father the same as Wilson the child? Or not?
It looks like currently the situation here is a bit of a mess. Take a look at the 1870 census record attached to Wilson the husband. The sources for the parents in that census record are attached to the parents of Wilson the child.
By the way, none of the children "are in limbo." When you see a person on the left on the source linker whose box is green, it just means they are attached to a Family Tree profile but that the profile is not for anyone in the family on the right hand side of the screen. You can see who they are attached to by moving them to the Focus Person spot using the Change link in the blue box. You generally will find they do not line up right with anyone and you get a triangle warning sign. Click on that triangle to open a popup that states who they are attached to. You can click on the ID number to jump to that person:
In this case, going to the person Lizzie is attached to shows her with completely different parents than those in the census record, suggested that the census source is incorrectly attached to Alice Elizabeth and needs to be detached and reattached to the right person in Thomas's family where there is a Mary E born in 1847 and an Elizabeth born in 1851. The census doesn't actually give her birth year. It just says she is 21. Her brother William, with birth year 1850 in Family Tree is also listed as age 21. There are four other children in the 1870 census for the family of a Thomas and Sara Lamoreaux that are not attached to family members of the family of Thomas and Sara that the parents are attached to.
It looks like you need to very carefully examine both the 1850 and 1870 census records, fix any and all incorrect attachments, mark any incorrect hints as not a match, and figure out who the parents of Wilson the child is. Good luck sorting all this out. It's all a bit tangled now. But it is great that the hinting system is showing you the work you need to do. That is the benefit of it ignoring that a source is already attached to someone and showing that it may really need to be attached to someone else.
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Gordon, thanks for taking the time to write all that. I am working thru the names and slowly getting it straightened out. After your explanation, I understand the source attachment thing, but will the next person who doesn't have your explanation? I don't think the typical user will soon be able to navigate this system, it's not intuitive, the user interface is confusing... Somebody needs to back out and look at the whole enchilada.
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As a further example, when I look at the sources for John M Graham,
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/27N3-KY1
it lists the 1920 census, with unfinished attachments. Opening that, it's trying to match Lavina with Susan. Entirely different names, incompatible birthdates, etc. There should be options to tell FS "this is not a match" and/or create a new person right there but I have to go some long way around to create a dossier for Lavina. If I change the focus to Susan, it tries to match John with Susan. This is right out of Toontown.
The admins for the previous incarnation of this forum, on getsatisfaction, warned me to suppress the humor. I'm going to decline to do that. Because if I did, the very stones would cry out. You either see my bug reports or you put on blinders.
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In the sources for Parke Speary, https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/27NP-KR9 we have unfinished attachments for the 1930 census. Opening that, we have
James L Speary (Father) matched with James Linskill Speary;
Eva Speary (Mother) matched with Evaline Medley;
Park Speary matched with Parke Scurman Speary;
Ruth Griffith (Sister) matched with Florence Ruth Speary ???
The signals seen by the user (me) are exactly the same. The names left and right are connected in the middle by the word "Detach". There is NO CLUE that the first 3 are attached across, and the 4th name is ATTACHED TO SOMEONE ELSE. WHY is Ruth lined up with Flo????
When you have a human interface this confusing and nonintuitive, it is going to generate errors left and right.
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Yep, looks weird. I think part of the problem is the old one that computer are far too rational and do exactly what they are told. I suspect the problem in your first example is that because names can vary so much in records, that the source linker was designed to put more weight on relationships than names. In that 1920 census, the relationships are wrong:
So it is the index that has the problem, not the Source Linker. But, of course, there was no way the person indexing the record could have know Lavina was John's step mother. If John's mother had still been alive, marked as "Mother" in the index, and been recorded in the census as "Suzy Graham" things would have lined up just fine even though her name was really Susan Williams.
And yes, I have seen that when we start rearranging people in the source linker we can quickly get it so confused it just gives up and lets us put people anywhere we want them. For example, we can drag children's records around and really mess them up if we want. I can turn this:
into this disaster:
just by clicking and dragging. The real purpose, of course, is to fix things the source linker can't handle, not to attach source to the wrong people.
Just be glad that FamilySearch left the ability to manhandle the source linker, squeezing square pegs into round holes, and forcing it to do what we want, rather than being forced to accept the conclusions of a dumb computer. Maybe they will be able to improve the algorithm one day, but they probably won't be able to every handle all the strange situations and problems in indexes that will confuse any routine.
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Sorry for being dense, but I can't see any problem with the second example. Everything looks fine.
Green always means the source is attached to someone. If the paper with paperclip icon is there it means it is attached to that person to the right and if needed can be detached. If the paper with paperclip icon is not there or there is a gap between the left and right sides, it means the person is not attached to someone currently showing to the right of them but to someone else.
In this case, everyone looks to be correctly attached. Ruth Griffith who is listed in this census record correctly as the wife of George Griffith and the sister of Park Speary, and whose maiden name would have been Ruth Speary and who apparently went by her middle name is correctly lined up with her Family Tree entry which has her complete maiden name of Florence Ruth Speary.
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OK, my head is ringing with dealing with some ancestors who all seem to have 40 dossiers each, all tangled, but to get away from them and come here isn't feeling like a more rational situtation. Over and over and over I'm seeing nonlinear stuff in the Source Linker. Take a look at this one and if everyone sez this is normal and right I'll know where the problem is.
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How did you get that picture? Were you trying to attach Ethel's parents? (Was she married before to a Mr. Prindle or is Mr. Grove a stepfather? Is that really her mother or a stepmother?)
When I go to William, look at his sources, and click on the unfinished attachment link, I get this:
So things are just fine at this point when the computer has lined everything up. The source linker does have some quirks it that sometimes it matters if you move thing on the right first, sometimes you have to move them on the left first. And sometimes you can move them in ways that the computer just cannot keep up with because computers are dumb.
In this case, if I move Ethel to be the focus person using the Change link on the left, things work fine:
But what if I enter all this from Ethel's source? If I do, I start here:
Which is just like the picture above.
Now as I said above, using the Change link on the left can sometimes confuse things. So If I try that in the above picture to move William to be the focus person, I get:
Hum, still not broken. So I have to ask again, how did you ever get to the picture you took? I can't figure out any way to do it. Just for ease of reading, I'm going to re-post your image here:
Can you replicate this and explain step by step how you got here?
Wait! I tried one more thing! By starting with Ethel as the focus person on the left, clicking on the Change link on the right and pasting William's ID number in the Go To box, thereby overriding everything the computer knows and insisting that I do not want the left to change, only the right, (which is the function of the Go To box), I can force your image to appear:
But I can't imagine you would have done that! Why would you want to? That messes everything up.
So how did you get to your image?
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I'm sorry, Gordon, I can't remember. I'm certain I didn't mess with the Go To function.
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Well, keep playing around with this game of "Beat the Computer" and if you run across another source linker glitch like this last one, be sure and record every step. If there is something going wrong, it has to be something reproducible or the engineers will never be able to find it. If you can provide them with clear misbehavior that they can also cause then they can track it, catch it, and get it eliminated.
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OK, will do.
Here's a thought: Why do we even have the Attach Source function? Why not create a dossier for every name in the source, attach the source to the dossier automatically... so it can't be detached... and then look at the dossiers and merge the new one with the already existing one?
I don't like to endlessly badmouth the work of other engineers since I am one myself (I've been programming computers since 1968; I've written firmware for spacecraft, designed websites, etc.) but let's just say that the merge function seems to have been created by people who were not drunk.
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OK, here's a case; it doesn't take long to find them.
On the dossier K4R8-QKC (Olive A Lamoreaux) source tab there are two notices, "Unfinished Attachments / This source has not been attached to all people found in the record." fig 1
Clicking on either of these gives essentially the same result. The first one for instance opens the Attach Source function but there's nothing to do. I just attached those that are attached, 20 minutes ago. There are 3 unattached names toward the bottom; for instance, James Hayes Porter. He's the groom. This is the bride's family on the right. There isn't any way to attach him to his own family. No button, no icon to click, no menu that will drop down, no option anywhere that I can see. fig 2.
I can slide him up to put him in as a sibling in the bride's family, but that would be incest!
I'm not sure there is a dossier for him yet; but I've seen this Source Linker function sometimes offer to create a new dossier. Not today tho...
I can change the "Person of Record and Spouse" on the left to James Hayes Porter; this results in the Attach Source function lining up people in strange and bizarre ways. Out of the 8 people thus lined up, four are aligned with someone of the opposite sex, and none of the names are remotely similar. And his own family is still nowhere in sight. fig 3.
As I noted, clicking on the second one gives essentially the same result. It is the same record of the same marriage, BTW but the system still thought it needed attaching and still thinks it's not finished. fig 4.
So why does the Sources tab notify us that there are Unfinished Attachments if there's no way to Attach Them?
I have left everything exactly as is for investigation.
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Eureka! (I think.) Your comment about drunk programmers got me thinking and I had a small flash of inspiration that I think I have been aware of but never fully articulated.
If I were a completely uninformed American, rather than the, I hope, adequately educated one that I am, and you dropped me in the center of London, I would think everyone was drunk because they are all driving on the wrong side of the road. The actual trouble is that I don't understand the fundamental rules running the place. That is the same thing that makes the Source Linker look strange at times, a lack of understanding of its basic principles.
Going over all your examples and reflecting on all the sources I have attached and patterns I have seen in the Source Linker, I think I have stumbled on its basic programming. The programmers had to deal with the fact that many sources are just bad. Spelling is off. Different people have the same name. People were rude enough to change their names, particularly women when they got married. Years are inaccurate. So they have made Source Linker 99% based on RELATIONSHIPS!
Names and dates play a much smaller role.
For example, the index of the 1870 Norwegian census, for some reason, did not include any family relationships at all. So when I try to attach a source from it, Source Linker can't do any lining up beyond the Focus Person who I entered the Source Linker from:
Even though the spelling for Karen's father's name matches perfectly and the first name for her mother also matches perfectly they stay in the Other On Record section. Apparently because there is no defined relationship, Source Linker will not line them up based on name alone. The users has to declare them to be the same people by dragging them into place.
In this next example, from the 1900 Norwegian Census:
People line up nicely because of the relationships. Inger's father in the source is matched with her father in Family Tree, not because the names match but because they are both fathers. Her mother matches for the same reason. A sister relationship in the source causes a person to be put in the Siblings On Record category, then an attempt is made to line up with a Sibling From Family Tree based on name and dates.
When sources are already attached and show in green, Source Linker does usually line those up the person they are linked to Family Tree without trouble.
So to take your first image, James, Samuel, and Cynthia have no hope of lining up automatically because they have no relationship recorded in the indexed source.
You can often get people to line up by changing the focus person as long as that brings out relationships. But you can always force them to line up properly. That is the function of the Go To box.
I'll go take a look at your latest example in Family Tree.
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Going to your entry point at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/K4R8-QKC and looking at that first incompletely attached source, I first have to take a look and figure out who all these people are and learn that Olive is the mother of the bride. This is probably the worst possible place to start but is still doable.
Here is the starting point as shown in your image:
From the record, I know that James is Gertrude's husband. So first step is to make Gertrude the Focus person by clicking on the left-hand Change link:
All the relationships are now in reference to Gertrude and the husband on the record lines up her husband in Family Tree, ignoring names because Source Linker looks at relationships. But James was her first husband, apparently, and doesn't exist in Family Tree yet. So I need to use the very unobtrusive and subtle Change Spouse button to change her spouse to None Of The Above:
Now you can create James in Family Tree.
I won't go any farther than this, but after you create James here and attach the source to him, you can use the left sided Change link again to move James to be the Focus person. This will change the relationships to be in reference to him so that now Samuel and Cynthia will be labeled as his parents and be moved to the Parents On Record section with Add links where you can create both of them and then attach their sources.
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