G2G: Merging Reverend John Lothropp

Question

I recently discovered my relation to the Reverend John Lothropp, who came over as part of the Puritan Great Migration, and founded Barnstable, Massachusetts.  In the course of adding to wikitree, I found that he is in fact a rather notable ancestor and several branches of his lineage are well researched and published.  As such, there are several profiles that need to be merged - none of which I manage currently.  I picked up an orphaned profile for his grandson Israel (my direct line), and merged my tree to it, then stopped poking at it once I realized the scope of what I was running into.

Does the PGM group have a wiki supervisor member who can assist with the process of marking a profile as Historically Significant? Rev John has a wikipedia page, and with the creation of the PGM user group I think he qualifies.  I am not sure I'm qualified to be the overall profile manager, but I'm willing to do some of the legwork of locating profiles and so forth.

Does anyone have any tips on managing a large merge effort like this?  With his lineage published back 8 generations, and published forward into other HSAs, I'm rather expecting there to be quite a lot of generations to be merged.  I'm assuming the European Aristocrats ran into these issues already.

As a starting point, I'm going to suggest Lothropp-2 as the base profile - based on what I've found so far, Lothropp is probably the Most Correct LNAB (and is what wikipedia uses), although most of the profiles to be merged are Lathrop or Lothrop.

Comments

Just realized that John's daughter Jane Lothrop married Mayflower passenger Samuel Fuller, so this will quickly bump into the Mayflower Passenger group as well.  I would suspect PGM and Mayflower will end up with a lot of intersection on profiles.

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One other thing, my understanding of the guidelines on spelling of names is that you use the spelling most frequently used BY THE PERSON, and use the "Other Last Names" for alternative spellings.

Answer 1

I've been working on cleaning up the duplicate profiles of Puritan families,  I'm allied to Lathrop through marriage.  The Lathrop line has a lot of duplicates and will take a lot of cooperation to fully clean up.  I had to go back to Roberti Lowthrop born in 1450 to find a profile to work towards the present with as a starting point.  I generaally start as far back as necessary and start by proposing mergers of duplicate spouses.  I use the descendent page as a guide and work generation by generation.  I don't think the PGM user group has an actual supervisor, this being a collaberative effort though more experienced members tend to assume leadership roles.  To join us paste this into your profile: [[Category:Puritan_Great_Migration_User_Group]].  

As to the spelling, Wikipedia notwithstanding, most of the contemporary records I've seen use LATHROP and that is the most common spelling,  (Including in the photos I'm assuming you uploaded.)  Generally the earliest (lower number) profile becomes the final profile. I suppose a concencus will emerge as to the preferred spellling as the various managers reply to merge requests.   The HSA tag I believe is for anyone born more than 300 yrs ago and is used lock profiles to keep them from being merged away, though any duplicates should be merged into them.  I hope this was helpful to you.

Comments

Thanks, I joined the user group.  Do we have a discussion page, or project page, or something to help keep track of what profiles are being managed for merge and by whom?

I might recommend going all the way back to Walter Lawthrop b 1355, as I find 2-3 copies of each of Roberti Lowthrop's ancestors all the way to Walter.  Given that I don't manage any profiles until Rev John's grandson, is there any help I can offer now?

I haven't really found any consistency in spelling at all.  My g-grandmother's DAR record uses LATHROP up until Ebenezer LOTHROP, who is the ancestor of record and g-grandson of Rev John.  I don't feel strongly about any of the spellings, but whatever's picked, the other two should be in the Other Last Names.  Near as I can tell, the earlier generations basically played fast and loose with spellings, as is typical of the era.

I think the current wikitree policy on HSA is 200+ years old (or US President), there is a User Group to manage it, and is "historically notable", which is up for debate a bit but someone like Rev John would certainly qualify.  If we get someone who wants to be the overall profile manager, we can probably locate a wikitree supervisor to mark his profile as HSA.

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We use 2G2 or private msg for discussions.  As to keeping track of who's working on what, nothing special.  I do check the CHANGE tab on the profile I'm interested in before making any changes to see if anyone has been working on it recently.  Until WikiTree implements Soundex or sometning simular variuos spellings will cintinue to be a headache, especially  a name like Lothrop with at least a half dozen different spellings.  I haven't got into the HSA very deeply but have a few on my watchlist through mergers. I think Katherine Patterson (Alvis-9) who is a WikiTree Supervisor is the person to ask.

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I added the ship "The Griffin", to the profile John Lothropp

Answer 2

Stephen, Thanks so much for joining the PGM group and being willing to help de-dupe the current mess that is the PGM/HSA space.

You don't have to be a profile manager to initiate a merge-- just to approve of a suggested merge. And yes, please always find the lowest-numbered profile page and merge into that one. And you'll need to do some clean up of the resulting merged narrative once the pages are merged.

That said, my experience has been that many of these early profile pages have been abandoned by their initial contributors. In those cases, I wait a month (which really drives me nuts to wait that long-- but there are many more dupes to merge) and then if I don't hear anything, I write to Lianne Lavoie and she completes the merge. In some cases she opens the profiles up to be adopted by others.

Daniel, thanks for sharing your practice of checking the CHANGES page to see if there's been recent activity. I usually glance at the most recent edit that is on the page itself to see if anyone's been recently editing, but checking the CHANGES tab sounds like a really good practice.

When you want to discuss a merge, go to the profile page in question (again, would be best to use the lowest-number) and click on the "Ask a question about..." button in the upper right column. Be sure to select "Special Projects" as a category. I also flag G2G questions with the puritan_great_migration tag, too.

Or I try to. :-)

Thanks again for joining the fray.

Comments

Update: I now have supervisor status so I can expedite PGM merges.