Tree Inconsistencies: Update #1

On 31 October 2023 I wrote about inconsistencies in my family tree published on MyHeritage. They had been sending my periodic emails about problems their Consistency Checker program recognized in my data. At the time, there were 493 of them of various types but mostly date related.

I began looking at the problems and making corrections, thinking I could get a quick handle on a remedy or remedies. Almost a year later, I have not found the time to get all the problems fixed. In fact, even having made several changes, the latest email from MyHeritage says there are now 497 issues. I have added much data to my tree so I can only think that their program is getting more sophisticated and picking out ones that had been identified previously.

I looked further into the whole subject of tree inconsistencies and to programs one could use to identify and fix them. I even put together a talk about it to the Family Tree Gadgets Club in December. If you are a subscriber of the Family tree magazine you can join their Family Tree Plus and get access to many videos and other information.

As part of my review, I went back to my Legacy tree software. Part of their program is a Potential Problems Report which does the same analysis to identify inconsistencies. Legacy noted 1,058 records as having problems. So, I seemed to have had a bigger situation than I would have thought.

The Legacy report grouped the potential problems in many more categories, some of which correlating with MyHeritage groups, but many that did not. Why the different ones were not picked up by the MyHeritage Consistency Checker I don’t know.

A close inspection showed that there were some interesting categories that were certainly worth reviewing, that MyHeritage did not reveal, particularly regarding individual family dynamics. That list looks pretty complicated, but the records can be grouped into just a few main categories.

Legacy Potential Problems Major Groups

·         Childrens’ Births (704)

·         Birth spacing (416)

·         Related to Marriages (288)

·         Text 158)

·         Chronology (135)

·         Punctuation (31)

·         Bad Dates (30)

Most of the questions regarding births have to do with the spacing between children in any one family (416 of 704 records highlighted). Historically, one might find spacing of children of one to three years. When the gap is great than five years, consideration should be given as to whether the children were from the same family or whether there might have been another child in between them that you have not found yet.

MyHeritage did not catch this kind of discrepancy of spacing.

The other problem with births relates to the marriage of the parents (288 of 704 records were questioned) There was a large number of children noted (143) who were born more than 20 years after the marriage of the parents which seems inordinately long. Again, one could question whether these children should properly have been included with another family that had parents of similar names.

There were also 54 children whose birth came a few years after the parents’ marriage which again might suggest there could have been other children born before them. For 11 children on my list, one of the parents was recorded as being younger than 13 years old. That will almost assuredly be an error of the birth dates of either the child or parent.

There were 104 children born before the parents were married. And 65 children were recorded as being born too soon after the parents’ marriage, but we all know that the first child can come any

time; it’s the second one that takes nine months.

Problems were noted for 158 individuals for whom there were questions in the text:

·         Descriptive words such as “unknown”, “infant” or “baby” found in the name (68)

·         The husband and wife had the same surname (72)

·         There was a salutation (Mr., Mrs. Miss) in the name field (13)

·         There were multiple names in the name fields (5)

When you don’t have all the information about a name, sometimes words like “unknown” are often used, at least by me. I certainly have situations where people with the same last name married each other, a few being first cousins. Again, without a forename defined, old records often used a salutation that indicated their status in the community. Where there is confusion about the spelling of a name, or an alias might be recorded, I have, on occasion put both in the name field.

Getting the dates right is a common problem, with errors often made, at least in my case, by careless inputting of data. Of the 135 chronology problems, 104 of them had to do with the birth dates of children preceding the marriage date of the parents. Some children, of course, were born before the parents got hitched, but all those highlighted need to be rechecked.

I had 14 marriages of people aged 13 or under which are probably wrong. Then I had 17 miscellaneous problems including:

·         Birth date after burial date

·         Burial date before death date

·         Christening date before birth date

·         A marriage date after a death date

·         Events in an individual’s life recorded before their birth or after their death

It is likely that these kinds of errors are, again, carelessness in inputting data. Thirty-one potential problems had to do with punctuation or symbols being used or spacing errors of elements of a date, which my Legacy program frowns on.

Bad dates were indicated for 30 entries, mostly to do again with the format Legacy did not like.

While there may be good reasons for many of the problems indicated, all of them needed to be looked at to be sure information was recorded accurately.

MyHeritage Consistency Checker Categories

·         Text (317)

·         Children’s births (79)

·         Chronology (38)

·         Other (89)

Breaking down the problem list in groups we find the MyHeritage Consistency Checker was not as detailed as the Legacy summary.

Almost 60% (317) of the Consistency Checker issues had to do with text problems:

·         Inconsistent last name spelling (189)

·         Siblings sharing a first name (70)

·         Inconsistent place name spelling (31)

·         Married, or groom’s name is the same as the wife’s maiden name (21)

Children’s birth dates and general chronology problems (123) combined were 23% of the total versus nearly 79% for Legacy.

Under an ‘Other’ category, 61 people were not shown as deceased but likely were because of their birth dates.

Another 25 individuals were categorized as “disconnected from tree” which was a curious phrase. Many of these entries are duplicates that I should have deleted. Some were added as possible family members, but I had not decided where they fit.

The fewer issues on MyHeritage than were found with Legacy is more likely due to the parameters set out to compare dates rather than a criticism or incompleteness of the results

Over the next few blog posts, I will look at some of the specific problems identified by MyHeritage and Legacy and what I learned when looking to fix them.