What To Do When You Have Duplicate Children Records
Recently we received the following question from a OneGreatFamily member that we would like to share with you:
I've noticed on some of my ancestors that someone or somehow they end up with 102 to 130 children. Is there an easier way to correct this besides merging all the different names? On one of mine the husband and spouse seems to be almost the same but the children dates and place of birth really differ. What should you do?
This issue arises because OneGreatFamily's matching and merging process is strongly cautious about merging siblings. This stems from two realities unique to siblings: 1) Twins will share much identical information: mother, father, birth date and place, etc, especially if they died in childbirth. 2) Historically parents that lost a very young child tended to give a subsequent child the same name. Again, much identical information would be shared.
Because of these reasons, our system historically was very cautious in automatically merging duplicate children together, even if their information is the same.
Over the past year we have made several advancements to improve our algorithm that allows us to merge many of these cases safely. Even so, when you do encounter this issue, you can manually merge the individuals yourself. This improves the data for everyone who sees that family.
In the second case, where a husband and spouse seem to be almost the same but the children dates and place of birth really differ I would not merge those records, but leave them separate. Continue to use the husband and wife you believe to be correct, as well as the children, dates and birthplaces that you accept, and leave the other records alone.
How to merge duplicate children
You can merge two siblings by doing the following. Click on the Family Info button between the two parents' names so that the Family Information box opens.
Highlight both children's names. Click on merge on the right and it will have you compare records to see if they should be merged.
A box will pop up asking if you are sure you want to merge the records as one. If you want to merge the records, click on "Yes."