Separate — My Wake up Call

I had a chance to go to the National Genealogical Society Conference in Salt Lake City. It was during this conference that I realized two things. First, not very many people know about the separate function in FamilyInsight. And second, there is a much bigger need for it than I thought.

When I asked people if they had seen and tried to separate an incorrectly combined record using the new FamilySearch website, I found myself getting the same response over and over. First they would stop and over-agreeably nod their head. Then, they would begin explaining their long and painful experiences with the online separation process. The most common phrases were, “I spent 3 hours”, “it took all night” or “then someone recombined them again”. After hearing these stories over and over, I realized how much I took the separate function for granted.

For that reason, I’m going to take a minute to tell you about incorrectly combined records, show how the separate function works, and tell why it decreases the chances of someone coming along and recombining the wrong people a second time.

~What is an incorrectly combined person? ~

I, personally, like to call incorrectly combined records “I am my own grandpa” records. They are created when someone on new FamilySearch hasn’t been paying attention to detail. For example, if grandpa is named John R Vance and his grandson is also named John Vance, they may look at the names and decide to match them (even though they have birthdays that are very different). You’d be surprised by what records have been combined together. Sometimes the only similarities are a birth year or death date. Which is why it is so important to look at all the information before matching records up yourself. As a rule of thumb, Don’t match if you have any doubts.

~What can I do about them? ~

We know how incorrectly combined individuals are created, now lets talk about how to fix them. First, you can go onto the new.familysearch.org website directly and select “view combined records” and select the check box next to each mismatched record. Five records will show on a each page with their checkbox.
However, this option requires either a huge screen, a large amount scrolling, and looking through pages of combined records in order to find the mismatched ones.

The less tedious option is to open FamilyInsight in the “Full Synchronization” mode. Do a search on the similar person from your file. When you see the incorrectly combined individual come up as a potential match from new FamilySearch, just click on the “Separate” button.

This will then open up a new Separate window with all of the information for all the records that have been combined to form this individual. Instead of organizing it by each record, FamilyInsight will organize it by various names, birth dates and other events information. This allows you to select a birth date that doesn’t belong and move all the records that have that birth date to a second individual. So, if there are 20 records for your great grandma who’s birth date was Oct 2nd 1889 and 50 records for your grandma who was born in April 1907, you can separate out all 20 great grandmother records by selecting the blue arrow next to her birthday.

You can also move records back and forth until you feel like you have things cleaned up. Then, just click “OK” to make the changes happen. Everything you do with the FamilyInsight Separate function will be
reflected on the new FamilySearch website as well. Each of the newly separated persons will be combined into their own new record on new FamilySearch.

~How to I stop people from re-combining? ~

That brings me to my last point. I’ve had a couple of people ask me if our separate function will keep people from recombining records. My answer is both No and Yes. No, because new FamilySearch is built
so that things can be continuously edited, changed and combined, which means you can’t block someone else from making changes. On the other hand I say “Yes”, because the Separate function helps ensure a more complete and correct separation. For example, if there are 20 Johns and 15 Johans that have been combined incorrectly and you go onto the new FamilySearch website and find 14 of the 15 records with the name Johan. The one record you missed can make it so the 14 you just separated still show up as potential duplicates to be combined. So, the moral of the story is, the more thorough and correct your separation the more likely it will stay separated.

~Andrea Schnakenburg~

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