Why are the so many duplicates in online family trees?

 

The most obvious reason for duplicates in the vast number of online family trees is that every one of my online relatives with a family tree has duplicated some part of my own family tree and the family tree of every other relative. In addition, I probably have somewhere around a dozen copies of all or part of my own family tree on various websites. It would be wonderful if all of those relatives' trees were documented and accurate and I guess I could say the same thing about all the family trees I have on various websites. Some of those must be woefully out of date. 

The real issue is whether or not there is one reliable reference for all of the information on the various family trees? I keep two or three of my own family trees up to date by focusing on two or three websites. Some researchers elect to try to use a desktop program and keep it up to date. I am always moving around from computer to computer and trying to maintain a desktop program is just not practical but I do keep a backup copy of my family tree on a local desktop program. 

Is there a practical way to avoid all this duplication? There are several collaborative, unified family tree websites. These websites include the FamilySearch.org Family Tree, WikiTree.com, and Geni.com. Both the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and WikiTree.com are free websites. Geni.com has a free basic account but it also has a Geni Pro version that is currently $119.40 a year. The advantage of these collaborative websites is that the users all see the same information and duplication is decreased to the extent that the users actually collaborate and do not ignore the need for genealogically accurate entries. 

Duplication is a problem with individual entries in a family tree when there is more than one copy of the same person. Additionally, having separate family trees automatically duplicates all the entries between related researchers as soon as they enter the same person. For example. my Great-grandfather Henry Martin Tanner has tens of thousands of descendants. If those descendants decide to create their own individual family tree, they will be duplicating both the person and the research effort every time they enter a person who appears on another relative's family tree. Potentially, there are tens of thousands of copies of Henry Martin Tanner sitting out there on every one of my relative's individual family trees. 

Now, the FamilySearch Family Tree is a special case. It was seeded with millions of names that had been accumulated over more than a hundred years of research. Unfortunately, this process included the duplicates from a huge number of entries for the same individuals. For example, my Great-grandfather Henry Martin Tanner ended up with well over 800 copies. These collaborative websites have developed a way to "merge" two duplicate entries into one surviving individual. The process of "cleaning up the entries" is ongoing and will continue as long as contributors continue to enter duplicate individuals without rigorously verifying that the same individuals are not already resident in the online family tree. In the case of the FamilySearch Family Tree, the duplicates were there from the time when the data was uploaded, first to a website called new.FamilySearch.org and later when the same information was used to create the FamilySearch Family Tree. I spend a considerable amount of my time merging duplicates on the FamilySearch.org Family Tree. 

Duplicates are inevitable given the number of online family trees and the fact that relatively few people focus on using one or more of the collaborative online family trees. Whenever I write about this subject, I always receive comments from people who have a problem with the entire concept of a collaborative family tree but as long as this antipathy exists, there will always be a duplicate challenge.