Monday, August 29, 2011

Merge Decisions in Geni.com - No Match!

...
My dilemma with Geni.com  has been that I uploaded a GEDCOM with over 1,000 persons in my ancestral families back in 2008, but they went back only eight generations.  Therefore, there is the probability that others have added some of my ancestors in their profiles, and may have data that I don't have.

My choices to add data at this time seem to be:

1)  Add data one person at a time.  I refuse to do this, pending some sort of synchronization program.

2)  Search for and find my "end-of-the-line" people in Geni.com and Merge them one at a time.

I checked into the second option, and found that Geni.com has found quite a few possible merges for me.  Here is a screen shot of my home page on Geni.com:


Over on the right-hand side of the screen above is the area for "Tree Matches," with green buttons to tell me how many other trees they are in.

I clicked the "View All Tree Matches" link (beside the "Tree Matches" title) and saw "Randall Jeffrey Seaver's Merge Center:"



At this time, I had 93 potential "Tree Matches." The words below that says "We've found your relatives in other trees. Review these matches to discover new branches of your tree."

I clicked on the link for "View 2 other trees" under the "Acton" column for William Knapp (the first entry on the screen above): 


This screen told me that I had these two possible matches for my William Knapp.  I clicked the check box for both of them and clicked on the blue "Compare Profiles" button and saw:


I reviewed the information comparing my data (on the left side) with the profile on the right.  I decided that this was not a match (it was easy - different parents, different spouse, different children, different siblings, etc., but I had a birth year and the other profile did not.  Ergo, the possible match, I think).  I clicked the blue "No, not a match" button.

After I clicked the blue button, the second possible match came up, and it was not a match either.

OK, that one is crossed off my list of "Tree Matches." 

Frankly, that label "Tree Matches" should be labelled "Possible Matches."  How many people click on each one and accept the match without checking the details for the potential identical person?  I don't know, but I'll bet that is pretty frequent.

I've found that most of the "Tree Matches" in "Randall Jeffrey Seaver's Merge Center" are not matches, but result from the Geni.com algorithm that tries to identify possible matches due to similar name and similar parents and/or birth date.  When there is no birth date, Geni.com seems to find persons with non-similar parents names. 

I'll look at the sequence when there is an actual "Tree Match" in a later post.

1 comment:

Xfaith said...

I have about 100 "matches" on my tree also, but I dont have a PRO account so I have not been able to really verify them.

At one time I did the 14 day free trial and checked the current matches back then and none of them were valid.

I could be missing a match here or there, but its not a tipping point for me at this time to worry about tree matches via GENI.

I prefer the Smart Matching done with MyHeritage/FTB they seem to find more acurate matches over time for me.