File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 19 - Unrelated People

One of the post merging tasks is to check for any "islands" or people without relationships. What I hadn't looked at in the 2nd GEDCOM file, was for any data errors. But I ran the Data Error Report on this merged file and found some errors that need to be addressed.

Going to the Publish Workspace, Person Collection, selecting the Data Error Report. There is an Items to Include ICON. Since I know that I will have illegal characters for the 5 underscores (_____) for unknown names, I removed that option. Also removed missing birth and marriage dates, as I know there are many missing.

Want to make  sure that All Individuals is selected in the right hand panel and generate the report. There was one Potential Error that I expected was "This individual's children sort order may be incorrect." (in blue)  Afterall, there may have been additional children added to a family. That is easy to resolve on the People Workspace, Family View, with the Sort Children ICON on the right of the Marriage Line.

What I wasn't expecting was a series of "This individual has no parents, no children, and no spouses". (in red)

Here is where the payoff was for putting a Citation on ALL Facts that reflected where the information (fact) came from. Each of the items on this 2 page report, came from the 2nd file, or the file that I merged into my initial file.

The next task will be to Identify each of these people and add a New Task. For these Data Error Tasks, I use the exact wording that is in the Data Error Report.

Looking at the Family View and the mini-pedigree chart, each of these people, in the report have no relationships.

Lesson Learned: After a merge of two files, run a Data Error Report.

For this issue, I will go back and review that 2nd file that I had backed up BEFORE the merge, to see if this was an issue in that file, with the potential of being a GEDCOM issue.

Copyright © 2011 by H R Worthington