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Last Week at OneGreatFamily
Site Activity Summary
195,291 new individual merges!
56,652 new individual hints!
66,046 new family merges!
20,610 new family hints!
122 average individual merges per group
35 average individual hints per group
40 average family merges per group
5 average family hints per group
If you didn't receive a GenMail telling you about new merges in
your family tree, your tree wasn't affected by this activity. You
may want to add new individuals or information to your family tree
to improve the likelihood of matches and merges taking place.
Having Success?
OneGreatFamily wants to hear from you. Please send us your success
stories and your recommendations for new features.
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story
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Have more success and help others by cleaning up your
family tree.
In honor of Family History Month, we are asking everyone to clean
up their family tree. Not only will this help your success at OneGreatFamily
but it will help others find success as well.
How do you clean up your family tree?
You can help "make OneGreatFamily beautiful" by cleaning up the hints
and conflicts in your family tree. Each time you resolve a conflict
or accept a valid hint, you are tying OneGreatFamily together. This
means you are helping to reduce duplication within the family tree
and providing more points for collaboration.
Your efforts to improve the quality of data at OneGreatFamily will
have an impact on others. OneGreatFamily is a collaborative family
tree and works best when its hundred of thousands of users coordinate
efforts, add data, and resolve conflicts.
When you help "clean" OneGreatFamily, you are helping the entire community
by providing growth to family trees and additional data for verification.
You can also resolve conflicts and make corrections with confidence,
knowing that your efforts will only help the efforts of others.
The power of collaboration is a big part of the OneGreatFamily experience,
but OneGreatFamily needs your help to "make OneGreatFamily beautiful."
 Subscribe
to OneGreatFamily in October in honor of Family History Month
Login
to OneGreatFamily to clean up your family tree in celebration
of Family History Month. |
What are "Hints"  and
how do they help me grow my family tree?
Hints are possible matches between your family tree and the family
tree submitted by another OneGreatFamily user. By resolving Hints
you have the potential to add new generations to your genealogy.
Overview - Here’s how it works:OneGreatFamily is constantly performing
searches within the OneGreatFamily tree looking to match the ancestors
you have entered with the ancestors entered by others. When a potential
match is found, a Hint icon () will
appear next to or on the name of the individual in your pedigree (Starfield).
One of your key efforts within OneGreatFamily is resolving these Hints.
First step - Make sure Hints are turned on: To use this valuable
tool, start by selecting the "View Hints" icon ()
on your Genealogy Browser Toolbar. This will display a Gen-bulb ()
icon on every individual in your pedigree (Starfield) that has a possible
match.
Second step - Open the Edit Individual window: Select an individual
with the Gen-bulb ()
icon in your pedigree (Starfield). That will load their information
into the family information on the left side of the screen and a Gen-bulb
should now be showing next to his or her name in the box labeled “Individual”
in the upper left hand corner. Click on this individual’s box once
to bring up the “Details For:” dialog. Next, click the Hints ()
button in the dialog to view the possible match. You are presented
with another window similar to the "Details For:" screen
showing the data from the possible match alongside the data for your
individual.
Third step - Deciding if these two people are one in the same:
Now you need to decide if these two people are one in the same.Before
you decide, be sure to check each of the tabs across the top of the
window. You may need to check other records or talk with other family
members.Once you have decided, you can proceed.
Fourth Step - To Merge or not to Merge, that is the question: Understand
that merging a person with your person doesn’t destroy your data or
overwrite it . The differences in data will be preserved and will
be shown as Conflicts. We’ll talk more about Conflicts in another
Newsletter.At this point, you have four choices:
1) Merge the two people by clicking on the button labeled “<<
Merge”.
2) Decide not to merge the two people by clicking on the button
labeled “Clear”.
3) Postpone making a decision by clicking the button labeled
“Close”.
4) Choose to collaborate with the other OneGreatFamily user
by clicking the “Collaborate” button.We’ll talk more about collaboration
in a future newsletter.
The Power is in your hands:One of the great strengths of OneGreatFamily
lies in its ability to allow multiple people to agree that their ancestor
is the same person without agreeing to all the details of his or her
vital records. Hints are the means to identifying those opportunities
and resolving them.
Subscribe to OneGreatFamily and check
your Hints today!
Visit OneGreatFamily to view Hints
in your Family Tree. |
Examples of when you should or should not merge data
OneGreatFamily is the first truly collaborative genealogy service
that allows everyone in the world to work on a common family tree.
Overcoming the challenges of letting people work on the same family
tree hasn't been easy. First, we had to ensure that people would always
be able to retain "their own" view of their family tree. This means
that OneGreatFamily respects the opinions and information provided
by each person using OneGreatFamily and preserves each unique perspective.
Where conflicts or disputed evidence occurs in OneGreatFamily, each
person maintains his or her right to see the information believed
to be "right" or "most accurate."
Where other software applications require an immediate choice to be
made when merging two individuals together as to which version of
information to keep, OneGreatFamily allows users to merge individuals
and still preserve all of the information from both trees that have
been merged.
The rule for merging two people together in OneGreatFamily is quite
simple (but can actually require collaboration or additional research):
"Feel comfortable merging together any two individuals in OneGreatFamily
who you are confident are actually the same person." The question
then becomes, "How confident?"
OneGreatFamily can help with your confidence level. When you click
on a hint lightbulb, you will see a tab at the top that shows OneGreatFamily's
confidence level that the two records are duplicates. Hints only occur
if there is a high probability of duplication. You can look at parents,
spouses, children, siblings, and event information to become more
confident in your decision to either merge the records or to reject
the hint.
Here are two good examples:
Example 1: Two individuals in OneGreatFamily have the same
name, parents and birth information. They also have identical spouses
by name. On closer examination, however, you see that the version
in your tree includes three children and the other version includes
only one child. The child included in the other version is also included
in your list of children.
This is a case where you can safely merge the two individuals. OneGreatFamily
did not automatically merge them because they had different information
for the children; however, the chance that they are actually two different
people is remote.
Merging these two people will create a conflict, but that's OK. You
will continue to see three children from your perspective, and the
person who submitted the other version of the family tree will now
"inherit" two additional children. Merging the two lines together
may provide both of you additional names and information for your
known family trees.
That's part of the power of OneGreatFamily. You can collaborate with
the person who submitted the other version of the family tree. In
this case, there is a good chance the other researcher has only focused
on a direct line and has chosen not to research other siblings. Merging
the common ancestor can provide one or both of you with exciting new
leads and information to verify and "make your own."
Example 2: Two men in OneGreatFamily have the same parents
and birth information, but their wives and children don't look the
same. Upon closer inspection, the two men have one wife in common,
but one of the men has a second wife listed. You look further and
recognize most of the children also have the same information. The
common wife also has the same birth information and names for parents.
In this case, you can also safely merge the two men and the wife who
is listed as the spouse in both cases; however, be careful NOT to
merge the second wife who was listed for one of the men with the first.
Merging the two duplicate men does not mean you agree that he had
two wives or that you necessarily agree with the information included
in the other family tree. It simply means there is enough information
available to identify both individuals as the same person.
Merging these people will also create conflicts. You will have conflicts
on the children as well as on the spouses. You will want to merge
both instances of the common wife, since you have verified that the
information has been duplicated and merge together any duplicate children.
Take care NOT to merge the two wives together, since they are not
the same person and come from different families.
You can feel comfortable merging people together who are obviously
the same, even if all of the detailed information doesn't match perfectly.
Use your common sense to only merge together people who are in fact
duplicates of each other. Looking at available notes and sources can
be another tool to identify when two people are duplicates.
You will always be prompted to resolve conflicts that occur as a result
of merging people together. Don't feel that you need to accept the
information that has been supplied by others as your own. You will
want to refer to notes and sources to inform any decisions you make.
You can also contact the other researcher to learn more about the
information they have supplied. Differences in opinion or evidence
are natural in genealogy. Resolving all conflicts, although it may
sound like a noble goal, is not necessary to succeed with OneGreatFamily.
OneGreatFamily will continue to automatically provide hints and merges;
however, your participation and the participation of others is vital
in the effort to create a "common family tree" for all of humanity.
Subscribe to OneGreatFamily to find
all your ancestors.
Visit OneGreatFamily and expand your
family tree today! |
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to OneGreatFamily.com. OneGreatFamily needs your help in growing the
largest single family tree in the world. You can get free subscription
time on OneGreatFamily by referring others to this unique service.
When anyone you refer to OneGreatFamily subscribes to our service
and enters your username, you get an additional free month.
Learn more about this FREE opportunity
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