Double, Double

 

Sometimes it helps to take a research break. To change things up in between two months of poring over Prussian documents, I thought I'd use this week leading up to Halloween for a different type of double, double, toil and trouble: I used the Ancestry ProTools to purge my in-laws' duplicate entries. Yep, I put my mother-in-law's family tree on a diet.

This particular family line is the one which inspired me to label it "endogamy lite." Over the generations, cousins from many branches of her family married other relatives, all within a specific geographic area. Since the extended family only has been in that region for the last two hundred years, it doesn't quite approach the technical term of endogamy, but I'd say the resultant family network is much more interrelated than mere pedigree collapse.

A while back, puzzling over my mother-in-law's ancestor Simon Rinehart and the will he left in Perry County, Ohio, the scorecard left from that ongoing courtroom battle between half-siblings prompted me to expand the collateral lines of that family in my own database. Well, that might sound like an easy project, but keeping in mind my second purpose in doing so—to help place DNA matches in the family tree—it was a task that took me months of work behind the scenes.

The problem with such tasks is that growing a family tree in both directions can result in duplicate entries. That's where the "double, double" comes in.

However, with a recent update to Ancestry.com graphics, I discovered that, just as I realized I needed it, I could no longer access the ability to "merge with duplicate" from the tools tab. Clicking on "Tools" simply jerked the profile page to the then-newly-added minimized header of the subject's name.

I waited. I tried again. I signed out and signed in. I updated every whizbang computer gizmo I could think of. I talked with chatbots. I complained. Twice. Nothing changed.

This week, I met with a fellow genealogical society member to follow up on the discovery that "Relatives Around Me" on FamilySearch.org's app thinks we are cousins. (Granted, we're actually seventh cousins twice removed, but hey, who's counting?)

We got together at a coffee shop, both lugging our laptops there to see if we could break through our respective brick walls to uncover just how this was possible. While I waited for my newfound cousin to locate a specific record on her computer, I couldn't resist poking on that malfunctioning "Tools" tab at Ancestry to see whether, after all this time, it might have started working again.

Surprise, like magic, it did. 

I promised myself then that I would take the next available free time to start clearing out my mother-in-law's double entries on the family tree—all those cousins who are cousins in more ways than one, complete with a different profile page for each direction in which they connect to the family.

That task, as the original ditty from Shakespeare implied, brewed toil and trouble. For each double entry thrown into the cauldron, the corresponding merge invoked more duplicates. Parents, spouses, children, and siblings seemed to multiply. Each time I clicked "merge" for one set of duplicates, it multiplied others.

I started out with a list forty three pages long of duplicate entries, but over the rest of the week, I've vanquished most of them. Along the way, though, I had to consult documents to confirm, say, that the single son of the couple in one profile was indeed the parentless spouse showing in another profile with no further details. Sometimes, it felt like I was adding more than I was taking away.

The tale will be told the next time I do my biweekly count, but in the meantime, it was a relief to attend to a task which long needed to be finished.