Need advice on 3-way merge - Christopher Wendel/Windel/Windle

Question

Thanks to the new match sort, I see that there are three versions (at least) of Christopher with the surnames Wendel, Windel and Windle.  They are respectively Wendel-316, (mine) Windel-8 and Windle-167.  There's also Wendal in the transcript of his will.  I've sent emails to the other PMs.  BTW, the Windel-8 profile is the only one with a family (My -316 just has one child and the -167 has no connections at all.  My initial feeling is that we'll combine them as Windel-8, but thought I'd check in and see if there's any standard for these surnames?  I'll be checking to see how many profiles carry which spelling and see if that should make a difference.  Any advice welcome.

Answer 1

Good WikiTree protocol for this situation is to create Unmerged Matches between the three profiles, while initiating discussion on the best choice for LNAB. Also, it's a good idea to add the variant spelliings in the Other Last Names fields of these profiles -- to help future visitors to WikiTree recognize that the person they are looking for is already here.

Please do not choose LNAB based on the ages of the profiles, the number of family members connected to the profiles, the lengths of the biographies, the number of sources cited, or the number of images included. The LNAB should be the contributors' best estimate of the surname that the person had at time of birth, based on birth/baptism records (if such exist) or other available information. (And sometimes the best LNAB will be one that's not currently displayed on any of the profiles. If that happens, the LNAB on one profile should be changed to become that preferred LNAB, and the other profiles should be merged into that profile.)

When the profiles are merged, all of the information from the text sections of the different profiles will be included in the merged profile, and the person who completes the merge will needs to edit the text section of the merged profile to combine the biographical information and sources from individual profiles.

Comments

Sounds like good advice.  Both of the other two profiles are from GEDs with nothing having been done to them.  I think I'll start by looking at what if anything is in the sources referenced via ID to see if any of them are indeed baptism records.  At least then I'll have an idea what to retain when the clean up time comes.  BTW do I just need 2 or all three possible unmerged matches?  If I don't find anything there  I'll look directly at FamilySearch and Ancestry.com.

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This is the kind of question that the New Netherland Settlers project and other pre-1700 projects deal with rather frequently (and Wendel is a name from the early days of New Netherland; supposedly from the Netherlands, but possibly from Germany). With three different profiles and three different spellings, I'd add all possible unmerged matches. They can be removed easily later on.

In addition to looking for records, I would consult with the German Roots project for advice on this German name and its origins.

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When you say all possible do you mean 3 or 6?  Since each of the three pairs could be done either direction.  

I looked at the other two profiles and didn't find any active outside link.  I think I'll first look at material gathered by a cousin of mine who researched the Windels with her late mother and sent me a CD with lots of original documents.  So I'll see if there's anything there.  Then I'll do Ancestry.com and FamilySearch as well as German Roots.

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Unmerged matches are bi-directional, so three matches will take care of all of the possible combinations.

And you can add the german_roots tag to your question to get project members' attention.

Answer 2

The merge should be into the "sourced" LNAB, preferably baptism, with other surname spellings noted as "other last names".