Saturday, April 30, 2011

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - "Problems" in your genealogy database

 From Randy Seaver over at Genea-Musings:

It's Saturday Night -- time for more Genealogy Fun!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Open your genealogy software program (on your computer or online), and use the Help function to determine how to make a "Problem Report" or "Data Error Report" (or something similar).

2)  Create a "Problem Report" or "Data Error Report" in your software for the persons in your tree (either everyone in the tree, or for a selected number of generations of your ancestors. 

3)  Tell us what type of problems or errors that your report found.  Tell us how many errors were found.  Tell us what problem or error surprised you. 

In Family Tree Maker 2011, the Data Errors Report is under "Publish" and then "Person Reports."  

When I first ran the report, it was 60 pages long.  Then I noticed that the vast majority of those errors were missing birth or marriage dates.  Well, I know there are a lot of people in my database that I don't know their birth or marriage dates, so I went into "Errors to Include" and unchecked those particular items.  My new report was only 4 pages long.  I did include all the individuals in my database.  

Here are the errors included on the report:

62  This individual's children sort order may be incorrect.
  8* The individual has the same last name as her husband. 
  6  The birth date occurred more than one year after his/her father died.
  5  The name may include a nickname.
  2  The name may include a title.
  2  The marriage occurred after the death date of the individual or the spouse.
  2  The birth date occurred before his/her mother was 13.
  2  The birth date occurred before his/her father was 13.
  2  The burial date occurred before his/her death.
  1  Residence date occurred before individual's birth date.
  1  The birth date occurred after his/her father was 80. 

Grand total = 93

I don't think that's bad for the approximately 3,600 individuals in my database. Were there any surprises?  No, not really.  When inputting that many figures, I am bound to enter some wrong dates somewhere!  However, they must be corrected.  Something else to add to my to do list!

*(I know at least one of these is NOT an error because both parties had the same last name when they married.  I'll have to check the others.)

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