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Tuesday, July 29, 2025

FamilySearch Improved Merge Experience

 


One basic fact about online family trees is their propensity to create duplicates. This apparently stems from the belief by each family tree contributor that their work is somehow unique and completely accurate. When this belief in uniqueness and accuracy is extended to the large online family tree websites, the results is the larger the family tree the more likely the possibility of duplication. A huge, collaborative, universal family tree such as the FamilySearch.org Family Tree is by its collaborative nature to provide a place for all those believing in uniqueness and accuracy. The number of duplicates entries on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree has been, in the not too distant past, into the hundreds of millions. According to FamilySearch.org Facts, there are about 1.72 billion people in the Family Tree. Even if only 1% of that number were duplicates, there would be about 17.2 million duplicate entries. So, what is the actual percentage?

The actual number of duplicates could only be determined by some sampling method that took large numbers of people in the Family Tree and looked at them to see if they had any duplicate entries. Currently, in some cases, the Family Tree will tell users that there are duplicate entries. But, in my own experience, some duplicates only show up when information is added to one of the entries. For example, if I have an entry for a person with a very common name, when I do the research, I often see duplicates show up and if I am working with a family, those duplicates can continue with all the family members. This happens frequently enough for me to assume that there are a huge number of duplicates in the Family Tree. 

The Family Tree has several features that attempt to prevent duplication. However, a new person can be added to the Family Tree simply by indicating that there are no matches to existing entries. When the new entries are being added by someone uploading a GEDCOM file or working on a linking project duplicate entries are almost guaranteed because the standard FamilySearch method for determining duplicates does not find duplicates that are only discovered through doing research by adding sources and verifying all the information. 

Here is an example of a person with an extremely common name that has been been added with no sources from a GEDCOM file. 


There is obviously not enough information about this person to determine if there is a duplicate entry. Her husband is Marcos Garcia de Jove PSG1-PCF. He also has no sources. The issue here is that by doing more research on this person who has no birth date and no death date finding duplicate entries is fairly common. That is true here because of the huge number of people named Maria Velazquez and also the fact that we do not have her full name and any information about her birth, marriage or death. 

Here are some recent articles about the new Merge Experience. 

  • Grant, Kathryn. “FamiilySearch Family Tree Merge Experience Has a 2025 Update • FamilySearch.” FamilySearch, July 11, 2025. https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/family-tree-merge-2025-update. 
  • Id: 935, Article. “Merge Duplicate Records in Family Tree • FamilySearch.” HLPC Help Center, April 20, 2020. https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-merge-possible-duplicates-in-family-tree. 
  • Tennant, Amie. “How to Fix Incorrect Merges in Your Family Tree • FamilySearch.” FamilySearch, March 10, 2025. https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/fix-incorrect-merges-on-familysearch.
If you have questions about the new Merge, you can get help from the FamilySearch.org Community. 


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