19 October 2016


Warning Sign by palomaironique

In between house remodeling and stuff like that, I've been playing with my family history data again.  Although the plan was to clean up sources, instead I have been working more on the problem reports.  So far, most are pretty easy fixes like wrong dates (typos) making someone 213 yrs at death or married before born.  A few have been "unknown sex" generally because I forget to select  when entering the person, but a couple are not immediately clear from the name.  On those, I've gone back to the record of birth or baptism to see if sex is given.  Usually it will say a son of or daughter of.  If I do not have birth or baptism, it's back to the census or marriage or other record which named this person as a child of parent.  I think I have all those problems settled.

One of the more major errors caught was where I had a person who died as an infant married and having children.  This is pretty easy to do with the Dutch families in particular because of the tradition to name children for the grandparents and other family members.  If that child then dies, then name is re-used for the next child of that sex to be born.  I have found families where the same first name is given to at least 3 children.

In this case, I thought it was going to be a chore to delete all those facts from the infant and add them all to the living person.  But then I wised up and realized all I had to do was change the birth and death dates of each to the other!  Presto correct!!  The little warning sign disappeared!