Does merging cause duplicates?

Question

I would like someone to explain a bit about the mechanics of merging.

There are many profiles, for example Brackett-19 or Wheeler-195 where there are an absurd number of children, and many obvious duplicates have come into existence.

I have grown reluctant to merge with profiles like this because I am getting the impression that merging profiles multiplies the problems of all pre-merge profles.

Could some patient person tell me - and others - if there is an efficient way to tackle this. I would love to contribute to cleaning up duplicates as we assemble unified trees, but the permutations seem boggling.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The important thing to understand is that when you do a merge, you're only merging the duplicates of one person, not a whole family.

The act of merging does not create any new duplicates. It just sometimes brings them into the same family. For example, if you merge two profiles for John Smith, and each of those profiles originally had all of his children, then once the John Smiths are merged, all those children profiles will have the same father. So when you look at the combined profile, there will be twice the number of children. But those profiles were already there. Now they're just easier to find.

So, merging is still an improvement. It might make one profile look messier, but only temporarily, until the family members are merged. And it's still a step in the right direction for cleaning up the tree.

I hope that helps clear things up!

Answer 2

Find a supervisor who is familiar with the family and convince them to help you merge all the duplicates.

To the best of my limeted knowledge, this is the only way to do it.