Partial Answer to the Merge Question in FamilySearch Family Tree

In doing some more investigation about my inability to merge two individuals in FamilySearch Family Tree, I found the following statement in the FamilySearch.org Help Center Document ID: 114163:

In preparation to migrate new FamilySearch data to the Family Tree database, the database team is un-combining the individuals that have the most duplicates in the new FamilySearch database.

This is manifesting itself as combined records suddenly being completely separated and creating duplicates. This is part of the work that is needed in order to prepare the data for Family Tree. This is not happening to all individuals who have been combined, just the ones with the largest number of duplicates.

We ask for your patience and understanding during this transitional period. Please do not re-combine these individuals yet, and give the database team some time to transition the data.

OK, so this essentially says to me, be patient. I will now do a search to see if there are any other duplicates I might find. If I do find some to merge I will report back in a future post. 

Abbreviations

If you have done genealogy for any time at all you have probably run across something that looked sort-of like this:

John DOE, b. abt. 1895, Phx. Mrcp. Az. d. abt. 1945, Bbnk, LA, CA.

Translated, this likely means

John Doe, born about 1895 in Phoenix, Maricopa, Arizona. Died about 1945 in Burbank, Los Angeles, California.

Now, which one make more sense?

Abbreviations are a outmoded remnant of paper genealogy. When genealogists were using paper forms, it is obvious that the space provided for entering information on a printed family group record or pedigree chart was entirely inadequate. So the standard way to show all of the geographical subdivisions of a location was to abbreviate the names of the places. By analogy, again entirely due to the limited space of the form, dates and other information was also abbreviated. Unfortunately, when computers were first used to transcribe the paper forms, some of the early programs had the same limitations as the paper forms. Data entry spaces were often limited to 16 or 32 characters. Sometimes even the abbreviated form of the information would not fit.

Now what is the problem? Many of these abbreviations survive in online and personal databases. They are absolutely no longer necessary. The spaces for data entry today are more than adequate to take the entire name of the location, no matter how long or how many levels. I am not talking here about standardized place names, I am saying stop using abbreviations. Convert all abbreviated names to full names. Convert all place names to as much information as is needed.

This problem is more extensive than simply a transition from paper to computer, it has existed for centuries. Many early entries in parish registers and other similar documents used abbreviations. For example, Wm. for William and Thos. for Thomas. These designations are a completely different challenge. You cannot automatically expand the abbreviated form unless you have some other documentation that shows what the expanded name actually was. It is not good genealogical practice to assume information that does not exist. Your assumption may be wrong. The name should be recorded just as it appears, but the existence of an abbreviation is an open invitation to do more research to determine the correct expanded version of the name. Many times, using the abbreviation is an excuse for lack of further effort. Copying an abbreviation from someone else, without doing your own research is also unacceptable. It is always a better practice to try and find a document or other source to expand the name.

There are lists of early abbreviations online and in print that give you the expanded equivalent of the early practices. These may be helpful but also the individual who originally made the abbreviation may not have known what was standard and made up the abbreviation. Again, collateral evidence of the expanded name is desirable. If, in the end, after a reasonably exhaustive search, all you can find is an abbreviated entry, then report it, with the source as it appears in the record. Don't just assume you know what the expanded version is autormatically.

The Last Piece Falls Into Place? -- Merge Comes to FamilySearch Family Tree?

Without any fanfare, the merge function shows up on FamilySearch Family Tree! I got the notice as a comment to one of my posts. This is the last big piece of the puzzle going into place. The selection shows up as a menu item called "Tools" with a link to "Possible Duplicates" on the Individual page of a person in the file with duplicates. Here is a screen shot of one of my ancestors with the selection indicated by the arrow:

Good news, clicking on the link lists a number of possible duplicates. Here is the results for this ancestor:

Bad news, clicking on an obvious duplicate brings up and warning notice, "These two people can't be merged." No explanation, no qualifications, nothing. Despite the good news, I am essentially back to space one.

I know that this particular person exceeds the arbitrary limit imposed by FamilySearch on the number of individuals that can be combined in New.FamilySearch.org, so perhaps there is a similar limitation in Family Tree? Or there is some size limitation or another?

Does this render the entire program useless for me and thousands of others in the same situation with huge numbers of duplicates? Stay tuned folks for the next exciting episode. Will James Tanner be shortly out of the FamilySearch Family Tree family?

My best guess at this point is that all of the wrong relationships have to be resolved before anything else works.

----time passes---

After working through an almost impossible tangle of wrong parent/child relationships and deleting those that showed Sidney Tanner as the child of his grandfather and/or grandmother, I tried the merge again. No luck. Untangling the Gordian's Knot of relatives makes no difference to the merge function. The two identical people cannot be merged.

Patience is virtue. Will FamilySearch untangle this conundrum? Will I ever be able to use the FamilySearch Family Tree program? We are still in the stay tuned mode.

Why the FamilySearch Family Tree is revolutionary

You could view the FamilySearch Family Tree as just another step in the evolution of online user defined database programs, but I would like to submit that the concept of a unified, source-based, lineage-linked, family tree presages a fundamental and positive revolution in the way genealogy is done. Further, the revolutionary nature of the program will be minimized by those promoting the program, for the simple reason that they do not want the users to become overly concerned about the program itself. They would also like a smooth transition from New.FamilySearch.org to the "new" program.

Let's look at the present method of doing genealogy. I have my information about my family and I "share" it with others, either by sharing files or putting my version of the family online in a family tree program. If someone spots a similar family member in another user's family tree, then the two people can "communicate" their common ancestor, usually by showing the other family tree as a "source." The programs themselves make "suggestions" of other user's trees that might have similar or the same ancestors. In some very limited cases, family collaborate in building a "family tree." Of course the limitation is that unless someone is aware of the "family" they cannot participate in the family tree.

The relationship and interaction between the user participants in online family tree programs and other file sharing arrangements, still leaves each of the participants with their own version of the tree. If I choose not to add any sources to my family tree, that is my business. If you decide to source every event, that is your business and I really don't have to even look at your sources or even look at your tree. 

Now then, what is the revolutionary aspect of FamilySearch Family Tree? It is the idea that everyone looks at the same family tree. If I enter my data into FamilySearch Family Tree, it ceases to belong to me and becomes community data. Any changes or additions I make to the unified family tree belong to my entire family. Any one can change any person or event. Any one can add sources or not. But when I am looking at a particular ancestor, I am looking at the cumulative consensus of my entire family, not just my version of the family line. Because only one individual, no matter what name, date or place is inserted, can exist at every node in the family tree pedigree, there has to be a consensus.

New.FamilySearch.org tried to reach this goal, but had a fatal flaw; the files were not unified. If I added information, no one really had to deal with it. Why? Because my data just became one more combined record with up to hundreds of records for one individual ancestor. In addition, none of the information could be changed. It became difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the correct information from the incorrect information.

But wait, FamilySearch Family Tree is not fully implemented. What does it need to become truly revolutionary? First and foremost, it need a way to eliminate duplicate entries. They are promising a "merge" function, but unless this truly gives the user a way to eliminate duplicates, the program will become just another online family tree program. If every one of my relatives is looking at exactly the same information I am looking at, that move collaboration out of the "voluntary" category into the mandatory category. Also, distant, unknown to me, relatives, that come into the program and look form their "relatives" will also see exactly the same information I see and that I enter into the program.

If you think about this for a while, you will realize that this will revolutionize the way genealogy is done. What if I were searching for an ancestor in the 1700s in New England? If I found some information and put it in my "online" family tree, another one of my family members may or may not ever see that information, especially if they have their own "family tree" online. But if I enter the information and the source in FamilySearch Family Tree, we will both be on the same page, looking at the same information.

This whole idea is entirely contingent on FamilySearch Family Tree living up to its promise. If the program has some flaw that allows duplicates, then the unified idea will not work. Right now, we are still waiting to see if it lives up to its promise.

Pure Magic -- Pure Steve Jobs

Today, a 1983 speech given by Steve Jobs at a small meeting in Aspen, Colorado to the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) was posted online. If you want to have even the slightest understanding of why Apple is now the predominant computer company, all you have to do is listen to Steve Jobs talking in 1983. The speech and question and answer period that follows was put online on the Life, Liberty and Technology blog.  Here is a quote of some of the things mentions back in 1983 before the introduction of the Macintosh:

• He mentions that computers are so fast they are like magic. I don’t think it is a coincidence that he called the iPad “magical”.
• He states that in a few years people will be spending more time interacting with personal computers than with cars. It seems so obvious now, but hardly a given back then.
• He equates society’s level of technology familiarity to being on a “first date” with personal computers. He recognized that technology would continue to evolve in the near future as would people’s comfort level with it. In hindsight, once it became dominant the PC industry stood relatively still while Jobs was busy planning “the next big thing”.
• He confidently talks about the personal computer being a new medium of communication. Again, this is before networking was commonplace or there was any inkling of the Internet going mainstream. Yet he specifically talks about early e-mail systems and how it is re-shaping communication. He matter-of-factly states that when we have portable computers with radio links, people could be walking around anywhere and pick up their e-mail. Again, this is 1983, at least 20 years before the era of mobile computing.
• He mentions an experiment done by MIT that sounds very much like a Google Street View application.
• He discusses early networking and the mess of different protocols that existed at the time. He predicts that we were about 5 years away from “solving” networking in the office and 10-15 years from solving networking in the home. I’d say he was pretty much dead-on.
• He says Apple’s strategy is to “put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes”. Does that sound like anything we are familiar with today? And they wanted to do it with a “radio link” so that people wouldn’t need to hook it up to anything to communicate with “larger databases” and other computers. Hmmm ….
• He compares the nascent software development industry to the record industry. He says that most people didn’t necessarily know what computer they wanted to buy. In contrast, when walking into a record store they definitely knew what music they liked. This was because they got free samples of songs by listening to the radio. He thought that the software industry needed something like a radio station so that people could sample software before they buy it. He believed that software distribution through traditional brick-and-mortar was archaic since software is digital and can be transferred electronically through phone lines. He foresees paying for software in an automated fashion over the phone lines with credit cards. I don’t know about you, but I think this sounds incredibly similar to the concept of the Apple App Store. Plus his comparison to the music industry just might be foreshadowing the iTunes store. You need to listen to the speech to hear the entirety of this passage for yourself.
• Right at the end of the Q&A session, a question is asked about voice recognition, which he believed was the better part of a decade away from reality. Given the context of Siri today, it is interesting to hear him talk about the difficultly of recognizing language vs voice because language is contextually driven. He says, “This stuff is hard”.

Pure magic, pure Steve Jobs. 

Use the Family History Library Catalog

Well, you are saying, just look up stuff in the Catalog, how simple could that be? It turns out that it is not at all that simple, the Family History Library Catalog itself is a tool for all sorts of things besides simply looking things up. Here is an idea for alternative uses for the catalog.

My very frequent use for the family history catalog involves looking up places to see what kinds of records are available. For example, if I look for Texas in the pull-down menu for Searching Place-names, I get the following list:

The list extends down much further than the screen shot shows. Now, what does this list tell me? It tells me that there are hundreds of items dealing with genealogically useful records at the State level in Texas. Remember that there are some records kept only at the national level (such as military records), other records at only the state level (such as birth and death records currently), still more records at the county level (such as marriage record currently) and yet even more records at the local or municipal level (including all sorts of very local records). So, while I am searching, if I go directly to the place I am interested in, I will automatically miss all the other levels of records available.

Let's suppose I was looking for a birth record. I would scroll down the long list to Vital Records and find the following:

If you click on the screen shot, you will see that there are five categories of Vital Records. Hmm. Maybe I had no idea this could be so complicated. Now, by looking at the catalog, I can see all of the items in the Family History Library that might be of interest. I can click on any one (or all) of the categories and see the individual record sets available. When I click on one of them, Vital records-Indexes, I see 15 items, including several that are "online." This means that the documents in question are in the Historical Record Collections in digitized format for free viewing. If I click on the entry, I will find that the record is readily available. Unfortunately, birth records aren't one of the category of records available. YET. I say yet, because all of the microfilmed records are being digitized. So I will have to look from time to time to see if the records are now available.

If I do not want to wait for the records. I can click on the entries, go to the description of the records and order the microfilm online for shipment to a FamilySearch Center near me.

But, I am not through, since I am looking for birth records, I may wish to check the FamilySearch Research Wiki, for information about finding birth records. When I search for "birth United States" in the Wiki, I find an article entitled "How to Find Birth Information in the United States." I find out that there are a number of places, besides Vital Records, to look for birth information, including family records, probate records, land records, immigration and emigration records, military records, cemetery records, census records, newspapers, church records and others. Obviously, my search for birth information is not over with the Catalog entries I have found already.

Now, I repeat this operation for the county and town, looking at all of the categories that might contain pertinent records. You can see that you have already learned a great deal from the catalog and you have dozens of records to search.You now know several types of records that may contain birth information and you know a lot of places in your target geographical area where the records can be found. As a bonus, some of the records may already have been digitized and be online for free.

Think Rationally, Look Carefully

In the last couple of days I have seen a number of pedigrees from different people who were looking at their families for essentially the first time.  I had some time to view their existing information critically. In four different pedigrees of the four different people, all from FamilySearch Family Tree, there were the same set of problems:

1. The dates given for births, marriages and deaths did not match up with common sense or logic.
2. There were unexplained gaps between marriage dates and the dates shown for the children or between children.
3. The names shown for ancestors were inconsistent and multiple marriages were shown with different sets of parents.

In each case the person I was helping saw no problem with the data until I explained the problems. Even when I thought they understood the problems, they still saw no real reason to do anything about the inconsistencies. This information had been entered somewhere into the databases making up the FamilySearch Family Tree by their relatives and/or ancestors. This could have happened with any one or more of the online family tree program.

One of basic concepts of genealogical research has to be the concept of rationality. Do the entries, dates, names, places make sense? How old were the parents when the children were born? If children were born in different places, do you know why? How old were people when they died? These, plus many other questions help resolve basic issues with the data in a pedigree. So genealogy programs have a built-in time line, or ability to view the data superimposed on a list of national or international events. Other programs have error checking capabilities to check whether or not a county existed at the time entered or whether other information entered is reasonable. But there is no program that will do your job for you as a researcher.

Before entering a date or place in your database, think about it. Is it reasonable? Is it consistent with information you already know to be accurate and correct? This is not say that there won't be surprises and strange things happening, but in those cases, as long as you figure out what is happening, you can document your sources to support your conclusions.

In one of the files I looked at the last few days, the father was supposed to be born in Ireland, but died in Scotland. His children were born in Ireland. My question was why did he die in Scotland? I suppose you could imagine dozens of scenarios to explain what happened, but the real question was what was the source for the death in Scotland? And did they have the right person? One thing that alerted me to a potential problem was a change in the spelling of the surname from the grandfather to the father (who had a different name and died in Scotland) to the son (who lived in Ireland and had his name spelled the same way as the grandfather).

Spelling, inconsistent dates, name changes, inconsistent places, all these are clues that the information on a pedigree or family group record is questionable and further research is warranted. Is the record complete? Does it make sense? How much of the information has valid sources? Have you checked the sources? No one inconsistency is necessarily indicative of a problem. For example, spelling is somewhat arbitrary. Variations in spelling have little or no significance in identifying people unless it becomes an issue. But spelling variations only become a non-issue when there are sufficient additional sources to overcome the questions that arise. In this example, you could substitute any sort of variation or inconsistency in the place of name variations. The variations raise flags that require additional research.