Anthor's Gedcom import has added meaningless information to my profiles

+4 votes
149 views
Hello. I have had a few profiles (thankfully only three) I created and manage amended by someone's Gedcom import. I'm not suggesting any malintent. The import has added a lot of information to the text field, but much duplicative and uninformative. An example of the latter being long lists of "sources" - but these sources are just links hidden behind paywalls, which I find useless (but that's for another thread). Just wondering what I should do. Should I amend the profiles back to the original state? Thanks for your thoughts.

Heyer-97

Heyer-146

Füllgrabe-8
in The Tree House by Craig Daly G2G1 (1.6k points)

2 Answers

+5 votes
This is a frustrating situation for you, but, like you said, I bet the intent was not malevolent. It looks like you did a lot of hard work of these profiles. I would just clean them up and leave it at that. Wikitree does have a learning curve, so if this was a new person, he or she may just not have known what they were doing. (I know that was me at the beginning - I "messed up" a lot of existing files! Fortunately longer-term users were patient with my ignorance!)
by E Childs G2G6 Pilot (131k points)
+8 votes

I took a look at Heyer-97, and noticed it's a FindMyPast GEDCOM import, similar to but easier than an Ancestry import.  It uses the same separation of parts of a source, with indirect links in the Sources section.  So I thought I'd apply a new method I've been working on, for you to see what you thought about it, but you are welcome to revert everything back to the way you had it!

I removed all of the redundancy and empty parts, recombined the source parts, and removed the indirect links, and applied some basic formatting, nothing fancy.  You'll want to conform it to your style, if you keep it!

Methods used:

As to the record itself and what was added - he has a few sources you don't have, and a paywall should never be a reason to remove something, some sources will never be free.  Even if one person can't or won't reach a source, someone else can.  From these sources, there is a small difference in birth and death dates, might be interesting to check out.

by Rob Jacobson G2G6 Pilot (136k points)
Thanks for cleaning that up - much appreciated.

I find it a pity these automatic Gedcom imports create the issue in the first place.

As to the sources, all of these Find My Past datasets are secondary datasets created from primary sources I already had, so nothing new. I'm ok with links so long as the full data source is listed as well (which has happened here), given links are likely to become broken.

The differing birth year seems to be based on the reported age at marriage, which in the 19th century is not particularly reliable.

I'm certainly happy to discuss all this with the Gedcom importee if they actually looked at the profiles.

Related questions

+5 votes
1 answer
155 views asked Dec 21, 2022 in WikiTree Tech by Stephen Adey G2G6 Mach 2 (26.7k points)
+4 votes
1 answer
105 views asked Jan 19, 2021 in The Tree House by Kay Knight G2G6 Pilot (593k points)
+6 votes
2 answers
+10 votes
2 answers
178 views asked Sep 18, 2018 in WikiTree Help by Chris Orme G2G6 Mach 2 (27.3k points)
+2 votes
1 answer
+14 votes
5 answers
563 views asked Dec 27, 2016 in The Tree House by Loretta Corbin G2G6 Pilot (242k points)
+7 votes
0 answers
+3 votes
2 answers

WikiTree  ~  About  ~  Help Help  ~  Search Person Search  ~  Surname:

disclaimer - terms - copyright

...