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Monday, February 13, 2017

Consistency Checker added to MyHeritage online family trees


This past week at #RootsTech 2017, I had an opportunity to view the new Tree Checker or Consistency Checker from MyHeritage.com. This new feature is already available to all those with family trees on the program. Here is the description from the announcement from the MyHeritage Blog.
The Consistency Checker employs 36 different checks on the family tree data, ranging from the obvious (e.g., a person was born before their parent, or when the parent was too young to be a parent) to the subtle and hard to find (e.g., a person was tagged in a photo and the photo is dated before the person’s birth; or two full siblings were born 5 months apart, which is impossible). Some of the issues it finds are factual mistakes (e.g. wrong birth date entered), some are bad practices (e.g. birth year entered as 22 instead of 1922, or prefix entered as part of the first name instead of in the prefix field), some are warnings about possible data entry errors (e.g. a woman’s married surname was apparently entered as her maiden surname, or a place was entered that looks suspiciously like a date) and some are inconsistencies you may want to fix, such as references to the same place name with two different spellings. Any issue you feel is fine and should intentionally not be addressed can easily be marked to be ignored and will not be reported again.
Consistency and correctness is a major issue with online family trees and this issue has been partially addressed by the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, but the errors captured are limited. When my own family tree was run through the Tree Checker, I had over 700 errors. It looks like I have a lot of work cut out for me.

This is a major reason to start using MyHeritage.com as a family tree program.

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