User talk:DonEThom

Next step: Review your GEDCOM [28 August 2010]

You're not done yet!

WeRelate is different from most family tree websites. By contributing to WeRelate you are helping to create Pando for genealogy, a free, unified family tree that combines the best information from all contributors.

Now that you have uploaded Swift Gedcom.ged, your next step is to review what your pages will look like, review any potential warnings, and combine (merge) people in your GEDCOM with matching people already on WeRelate. You need to review your GEDCOM before it can finish importing.

Note: if your gedcom contains many errors or multiple families, we’d ask that you resolve and correct the errors, delete this gedcom and re-submit it without the errors before merging it with families already on WeRelate. If the gedcom is very large, we’d suggest breaking it up into separate lines and importing them one at a time, which makes the review and correction process easier.

Click here to review your GEDCOM

Once you have finished your review and marked your GEDCOM Ready to import, one of our administrators will review your GEDCOM and finalize the import. This usually happens within 24 hours. You will receive a message here when the pages have been created.

--WeRelate agent 08:49, 28 August 2010 (EDT)

Problems with gedcom file [28 August 2010]

Hello and welcome to WeRelate. Thank you for submitting your gedcom file. This is a reminder that your file must be reviewed by you and submitted for approval before it can be imported.

Since you are new, I have reviewed your file and I see some problems that must be fixed. You have some duplicate families and some impossible dates that indicate that wrong parents or spouses are assigned to the family. We will not be able to use this file. It will be necessary for you to use the Warning tab as a work list and fix the problems in your personal database. Then you can upload a new, fresh gedcom and remove the old one.

Please review the videos and tutorials and get familiar with WeRelate. WeRelate is not just a collection of user files like most gedcom sites. WeRelate is a single, shared database with a single web page created for each person and each family. As a courtesy to other users, we request that problems be fixed prior to importing your file.

If a person in your database already has a page in WeRelate, you must match them. We ask that you use caution and review the existing page before making changes to it. Some pages have been worked on extensively by WeRelate users. Others, quite frankly are a mess because of earlier gedcoms dumped into the database. You are encouraged to help clean these up, but we ask that you include sources for your data.

If we do not hear from you, your file must be considered abandoned and will be removed Sep 7. --Judy (jlanoux) 12:41, 28 August 2010 (EDT) (WeRelate volunteer)

Please do not add duplicate facts [7 September 2010]

You have modified several pages with the only change being adding redundant dates as alternate facts. For example, last night Person:Abraham Hathaway (3), adding an alternate birth of "11 SEP 1685" in "Tauton, Bristol, MA" when the page already had a birth of "11 Sep 1685" in "Taunton, Bristol, Massachusetts, United States". These facts are effectively identical and there is no reason to be adding yours as an alternate. There are at least 2 dozen similar changes that have shown up on just my watchlist.

It would appear that you are not doing the merge properly. When your GEDCOM data is compared to existing data, all facts that are checked will be kept. If your data is essentially the same as what exists, you must explicitly uncheck your data, and only allow it to be added as an alternate when it is meaningfully different.

On a separate but related issue, it appears that you have not been adding sources identifying where your data comes from. If you were to add a different date for some individual, rather than merely duplicating information that is already there, the first thing other users watching that page are going to ask is, "How do you know that?" And they are going to think it less than helpful that you are proposing changing the information for a person without adding such justification. Most of the time, people, whose data is sourced, tend to feel justified in simply removing unsourced data. So, you may want to consider abandoning your GEDCOM upload, going back and adding source citations to your data, and then re-uploading it when it is better documented.

Thank you, --Jrich 09:38, 7 September 2010 (EDT)

Next step: Review your GEDCOM [16 September 2010]

You're not done yet!

WeRelate is different from most family tree websites. By contributing to WeRelate you are helping to create Pando for genealogy, a free, unified family tree that combines the best information from all contributors.

Now that you have uploaded Swift.ged, your next step is to review what your pages will look like, review any potential warnings, and combine (merge) people in your GEDCOM with matching people already on WeRelate. You need to review your GEDCOM before it can finish importing.

Note: if your gedcom contains many errors or multiple families, we’d ask that you resolve and correct the errors, delete this gedcom and re-submit it without the errors before merging it with families already on WeRelate. If the gedcom is very large, we’d suggest breaking it up into separate files and importing them one at a time, which makes the review and correction process easier.

Click here to review your GEDCOM

Once you have finished your review and marked your GEDCOM Ready to import, one of our administrators will review your GEDCOM and finalize the import. This usually happens within 24 hours. You will receive a message here when the pages have been created.

--WeRelate agent 04:21, 16 September 2010 (EDT)

Problems with your gedcom file [16 September 2010]

Thank you for submitting another gedcom file. I have reviewed it and I regret that we will not be able to use this file. There are many duplicate families indicated by the warnings. The warnings also indicate a number of families with problem dates that must be corrected. You will have to remove this file, make corrections in your data and then upload a fresh file. I will leave this file in queue until Sep 23 to give you time to copy the warnings. Please remvoe it when you are done. Do not attempt to match items on the Family Match tab since we will not be able to import the file. This will cause problems. Thanks, --Judy (jlanoux) 13:22, 16 September 2010 (EDT) (WeRelate volunteer)