Sorting out relatives in Family Tree

FamilySearch Family Tree is available to anyone who wishes to preview the program. There is a Help menu document on FamilySearch.org that explains how to sign into the program. See Gaining Access to the FamilySearch Family Tree (pdf).

The good news is that the program is a marked improvement over New.FamilySearch.org.The bad news is that some of the messed up family connections from New FamilySearch are carried over to Family Tree. Presently, there is no way to edit the faulty family relationships and so any meaningful work in cleaning up the database will have to be postponed until further editing features are implemented.

Interestingly, the pedigree chart showing the relationships carried over are mostly correct. But the Family Members shown on the individual's page is a conglomeration of all of the worst of the data over from New FamilySearch. So, if you had problems with New FamilySearch, be prepared to see the some of the same issues with the new program, at least at first. For example, they have my Great-great-grandfather, Sidney Tanner, married to his mother, with his grandfather as his father, with his father married to his grandmother and so forth. It boggles the mind to even imagine how people got this absolutely settled pedigree so messed up!

I am beginning to suspect that the task of straightening out the pedigrees is going to be monumental. It looks like the procedure will be essentially as follows:

1. Find and merge all the duplicates.
2. Unlink any unrelated individuals.
3. Search again for duplicates and do another merge.
4. Add individuals to the families, one by one, checking at each addition for duplicates in the file.
5. Reordering the children chronologically.
6. Adding sources for each individual.
7. Reviewing the work periodically to make sure there have been no incorrect changes.

There may need to be additional steps in the future, but following this order will begin to cut down the number of duplicates and begin to correct all of the errors in the program. It would be helpful if the program has some automatic way of searching for duplicates combined with a merge function. Maybe that is coming?

It is too bad that they imported so much of the messed up information from New FamilySearch.