For those of you who have experience in merging files from the 1600's:
A Wikitreer (Chris) uploaded a file from Ancestry.com that turns out to be a tangled up mess. What makes matters worse is the last names are mostly Williams, with common given names such as John, Sarah, William, Ann repeated over and over. We've been working together to try to straighten it out. The file listed a woman as having 26 children. We've searched for documentation and so far have formed two separate families and a whole lot of orphans. These children encompass several generations along with many birth places and death places not matching each other. My husband is descended from one of these lines which is how I got involved in this. I'm keeping a list of all these orphans on a free-space page I designed to help me keep track of my merge projects. During this process, Chris has discovered these are not part of her Williams' ancestry, so fortunately, the records have no deep roots attached except for my husband's family.
Several of the orphans probably go together in yet a third family group.
Questions:
What do we do with the orphans?
Just leave them dangling in the hope that some day someone will join Wikitree and discover he/she's descended from some of these orphans so the development of the line will be continued? (Which means we can go back to work on our own family which we'd prefer to do.)
Keep researching until we put the other family/families in the correct family unit/units?
What do we do with all of the Ancestry.com source material that is totally inaccurate?
Delete it so it won't confuse other WikiTree/Ancestry.com members who can actually get on Ancestry.com and review the material? The deleted material can be retrieved if needed, from what I've read so would it be okay to delete it?
Or should we leave it for others to stumble over since much of the information in the sources probably goes with profiles we've culled out of the two main families?
Can we delete the 26 children listed within the biography on Whitley-395's profile page or should we leave them there as a reference to chaos? You can tell my opinion of what to do with the list, but I need the expertise of others to do this the WikiTree way.