Proposed Guidelines for Ambiguous Spouses resulting from a Merge

Handling Ambiguous Spouses Resulting from a Merge

When merging one or more seemingly duplicate pages within a particular ancestral line, you may often encounter multiple candidates for the husband or wife of a family (typically the wife, due to surname issues). How do you choose? This section seeks to guide you through this process.

How does it happen?

The bulk of duplicates on WeRelate occur from uploaded GEDCOMs when the data within that GEDCOM contains either:

• duplicates within itself (i.e., a single GEDCOM contains multiple instances of a given person). This can happen:

• If a child is incorrectly assigned to two different families, generally with the same husband.
• If a researcher is too quick to accept a possible spouse suggested by a search tool
• If a researcher is too quick to accept the work of others, who made either of the above mistakes.

• a duplicate of a Person or Family already on WeRelate at the time of the GEDCOM upload.

(Note: such duplication rarely happens when Person or Family pages are created manually by hand.)

How to correct the duplication?

When multiple spouses are paired with the same individual, first determine:

• Is this one marriage or multiple marriages?
• Are they multiple candidates for the same marriage, or are they both spouses of the same person via multiple marriages (or even a combination of both, e.g., one spouse for one marriage, two other spouses for another marriage)?

Just doing a straightforward merge may eradicate the subtle differences between these different cases.

The person doing the merging (the merger) must try to determine, as much as possible, how many distinct marriages are represented, so that they can end up with one Family page for each actual marriage to allow children to be placed in the correct marriage regardless of who the actual spouse is later identified as. Two candidates for being a spouse in a marriage, must remain as separate Person pages to allow their potentially different parents and vital data to be collected separately from other candidates.

Ideally, you can inspect the contents and see sources that explain the correct relationships. Less ideal (but not unreasonable when source information is missing or unclear) compare marriage dates of spouses with birth dates of children to see if any children were incorrectly attributed to both families (in that case, just make the change and add a note that this is probably the actual reality).

Additional options could include:

1. Just allow the different names to continue to appear as alternative spouses. This can be a reasonable choice when it's not yet clear which children belong to which spouse (usually but not always the mother). The family will continue to appear in "duplicate" searches, and others researching the said lines find this, they may add their sourced information and resolve the situation more quickly.
2. Add a "Disputed Lineage" section to the pertinent Person or Family page(s), summarizing what's known about the (duplicate) candidates.
3. When it's clear that there were two distinct families (e.g., a husband with more the one spouse), be sure to have two separate Family pages. For any children that are known (and documented) to be associated with a specific set of spouses, assign them appropriately.
4. When the precise parentage of children is undetermined, make a good educated guess but be sure to include a "disputed lineage" section on the Person pages of said children.
5. A "disputed lineages" section on the pertinent Family page would also describe alternative possibilities for the actual family.
6. In some situations, where you have mangled names or plainly scrambled family relationships, and no source citations whatsoever, it is not unreasonable to nominate such pages for speedy delete. After all, pages can be easily recreated when good information is available.

Things to Consider

As you evaluate which of the different approaches to pursue, consider

• What is the most explicit/obvious way to present the uncertainty?
• Might the result incorrectly be interpreted as yet another duplicate by the automatic duplication detection mechanism of WeRelate? If so, how can you edit the pertinent page(s) to prevent this?
• What would a GEDCOM upload of the affected person/family pages look like?
• Would the ambiguous situation be apt to be retained or lost in transition from WR to another application? (The other application might be WR, as a result of an upload of off-line work).