Spring Clean Your Family Tree

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Cleaning is work! Why bother? It's your tree, after all, and you can build it any way you want! 

 That's true, but most of us want to share our research with others and find cousins to collaborate with! And to do that successfully, we need to clear out duplicate people, extraneous relationships (such as step-parents who didn't raise the children), alternative facts (such as a vague "abt. 1882") when we have the precise date of birth, immigration, marriage, or death.

 Having accurate, clear facts and sources make it possible to tell the story of our ancestors better. And if you are working in an online genealogy site, a clean tree will allow their matching algorithms to get you the best hints to more sources, and more cousin matches.

Best Practices

  • Be sure to list each woman with her birth surname; if you do not not know it, leave it blank. If you know only the married name, link her to a spouse with that surname and if you do not know his forename, leave it blank. 
  • No longer is it necessary to note surnames in ALL CAPS, so don't do it! 
  • Enter dates dd mmm yyyy and places beginning with the smallest jurisdiction you know, up to the country.
  • Ensure that each fact is supported by a source; and each source is linked to a fact. 
  • Finally, do the facts you have verified seem to make sense? Or have you perhaps confused two people with similar names and dates? 

Some sites and genealogy programs have tools to help you check for duplicate people, normalize dates and places, and call out inconsistencies such as children being born before their parents, or living to over one hundred. 

Ancestry

While Ancestry.com has no specific tools to help you find such problems, Crista Cowan has a short video explaining why this work is worthwhile, and how you can do it. 

FamilySearch Family Tree

I recently found a webinar called Using Tree Sweeper to Improve Accuracy in Family Tree presented by Kathryn Grant. I was intrigued because I never heard of this tool, which can be found at https://fhtl.byu.edu/apps/tree-sweeper.html. The video is only 49 minutes, and well worth watching. FamilySearch Family Tree is one of the best places to preserve your research online, since it is free for people all over the world. In addition, MyHeritage and 23andMe both use the FamilySearch Family Tree in various ways, so you will want to have your part of it as clean, accurate and well-sourced as possible. Tree Sweeper sounds like an excellent tool to help you do that, whether you are a beginner or a pro!
By the way, I found this video at https://fh.lib.byu.edu/2020/04/13/using-tree-sweeper-to-improve-accuracy-in-family-tree-kathryn-grant-10-april-2020/. BYU has lots and lots of interesting webinars.

MyHeritage

MyHeritage has a tool called the Tree Consistency Checker. You find it on the Family Tree tab; scroll down to More and you'll see Consistency checker. Unfortunately MyHeritage still has no way to merge duplicate people, except to copy information into one profile and delete the other. If families have been duplicated, this is far more work than it should be! So if you are using MyH for your main online tree, be very careful not to allow duplicating of individuals, or fix it soon after they are created. 

 For more about how to use this tool, see https://faq.myheritage.com/en/article/how-do-i-use-the-tree-consistency-checker-on-my-family-site

WikiTree

Wikitree has volunteers who look for errors, duplication and inconsistencies, and fix errors, initiate merges and ask about inconsistencies. The community at Wikitree is the most friendly and helpful I've known. 

Geneanet

Geneanet checks your tree for errors automatically. For instance, here are some of mine: 

Since I downloaded my gedcom from Ancestry in order to upload to Geneanet, I will probably fix the errors in Ancestry, and then download the cleaned gedcom to replace the one with errors on Geneanet. 

 Finally, all major desktop genealogy applications*, some free, offer tools to help you clean your tree of duplicate individuals and inaccuracies. Of course by following best practices you will avoid bringing these errors into your research, but we all started as beginners! Clear those errors now and improve your work outcome.

 * Family Tree Maker, Family Tree Builder (free), Legacy Family Tree, RootsMagic (with addon), Gramps (free, WinLinMac)
Valorie Cowan Zimmerman

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