Building a family tree can be a fascinating and rewarding process, allowing you to connect with your heritage and uncover the story of your family’s history. However, despite your best intentions, there are many common pitfalls that can harm the quality of your family tree.
In this article, we’ll explore 8 things that could be harming the accuracy and reliability of your genealogy research, and provide practical tips and advice on how to avoid these problems and improve the quality of your family tree. Whether you’re a seasoned researcher or just starting out, read on to discover how you can build a family tree that is accurate, meaningful, and enduring.
1. Duplicates
There are a few reasons why you might end up with duplicates in your family tree. You might have accidentally entered the same information and created duplicate entries. Or maybe you used different formats for names or dates or entered information from multiple sources, and ended up entering the same information twice.
However they got there, duplicates can create confusion and complicate the research process. In the case of duplicate profiles, they may even result in the loss of information, because you may add important details to one profile and not the other.
To avoid duplicates and maintain the accuracy of your family tree, it’s important to regularly review and update your research, and use a standardized format for data entry.
The best way to detect duplicate profiles in your family tree on MyHeritage is to review your tree in List view.
This view lists all the profiles in your tree by name, so you will easily be able to see when one person is listed twice. I recommend using the option to sort by last name: this makes it easier to detect duplicates. Be sure to check the duplicate profile thoroughly before you delete it and make sure any information it contains that wasn’t added to the original profile is copied over.
2. Reviewing a good match only once
Got a high-quality Smart Match™? Fantastic! You confirmed the match and added any new details it contained to your own tree, and moved on to the next discovery.
But you shouldn’t stop there!
You never know what you might find on second review — not just because you might have missed something the first time, but because the person whose tree you matched with may have added more information to that profile since the last time you looked. It’s always a good idea to go back and re-review confirmed Smart Matches™ every now and then.
So how do you rereview your confirmed Smart Matches™?
Go to “Matches by people” under the Discoveries tab in the navigation bar and select the “Smart Matches” tab at the top of the page. Then, open the status menu that shows “Pending” by default, and select “Confirmed.” This will bring up a list of all the Smart Matches™ you’ve already confirmed, and you can review them to see if any new information has been added since you confirmed them.
