SNGF -- Have you used a Family Tree Checker?

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has our assignment for tonight:

 1)  Have you used "Helps" such as Tree Checker on Ancestry, Consistency Checker on MyHeritage, or the Family Tree Analyzer program to check for errors in your family tree? 

[thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!] 

Here's mine:
I have never used a tree checker on trees at Ancestry or MyHeritage, as I uploaded trees to those sites from RootsMagic and do not add to them from those websites.

I have used Problem Search for RootsMagic. Before running it, there are several options to select, such as locating people without a sex, the proper order of events, being born before parent’s marriage, before parent’s birth, after mother’s death, missing a surname, to name a few issues. I have run the program before and fixed some items. Let’s run it today to see what errors it can find.

After running the program, most of the problems are missing surnames. I have many women whose first names I only know and not their surnames. There are also five people with no first or last name but who were created so I could add a sibling to an ancestor, where I don’t know the parent’s names.

Other problems include unknown sex, parents married after birth, father is 73 years old when person was born, mother is 54 years old when person was born, and person was 12 years old when married. When I see these, I double-check the dates. Sometimes, the age is based on census records, which could be off as much as 4-5 years.

In this test, I found several problems that might need to be fixed:

• One was buried 3650 days after death (Sylvia Virginia Brown). This was a typo in the burial event.
• Another was buried 1352 days after death (Jack Kethley Coor). He died in 1945 but wasn’t buried in New Mexico until 1949. I should investigate why. If he was buried at the place where he died during the war, the family could have had him moved to a local cemetery.
• Edward Hoddell Dowell was buried 40 days after death. This was correct.
• Ella R Hibner was buried 232 days after death. This one was a typo.
• Mary Jane Johnson was buried 3285 days after death. This one was a typo.
• Mary Frances Patterson was buried 94 days after death. However, on checking the obituary, it clearly stated she was to be buried in a private burial the day after the funeral services on September 20. She had died on June 16.

It is important to run the program often, especially after entering lots of data to check for any keyboard errors.

Copyright © 2024 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.