Tuesday, February 3, 2015

More on MyHeritage Searches of FamilySearch Family Tree Profiles

In my post MyHeritage Searches for FamilySearch Family Tree Profiles yesterday, I made comments about the new feature on MyHeritage.

1)  Mark Olsen of MyHeritage provided more information in an email today in response.  Here are Mark's comments:
"* MyHeritage is still consuming a few remaining parts of the FamilySearch tree  'feed of changes', a process which will take about 1-2 more weeks to complete, and from then on there will be daily updates with incremental changes. Because of this, the number of profiles currently loaded on MyHeritage (835 million) does not reflect the current total number which is higher and will climb shortly to 900 million, and will then continue to increase further over time.
* There are some profiles (about 2% to 3%) that MyHeritage decided not to index. These are convoluted profiles suffering extreme duplication of relatives, such as profiles with 7 sets of parents, 120 siblings, and so on, on the FamilySearch tree. This characterizes especially distant ancestors from the 16th and 17th centuries. The blacklisted convoluted profiles can still be reached on MyHeritage through their relatives in case the relatives are not convoluted. So the number on MyHeritage is a few percent smaller than the number on FamilySearch. The good news is that this is re-evaluated every time a profile changes on FamilySearch, so over time as profiles are cleaned up, duplications are resolved and convolutions are removed, this information will be available on MyHeritage.
* MyHeritage has taken the genealogical liberty to clean up some information imported from FamilySearch into its copy on MyHeritage. For example, women named after their husband (e.g. Mrs. William Morris) have their first name emptied on MyHeritage because, in this example, William was not the woman's real first name. This prevents false matches. This means that the copy of the FamilySearch tree that is on MyHeritage is in several respects cleaner than the FamilySearch one, yet the daily updates ensure that any improvements that take place on FamilySearch are reflected on MyHeritage on a daily basis. Over time the trees will become identical.
* MyHeritage has indexed profiles from the FamilySearch tree where, in some cases, there was mild duplication or mild convolution, and in this case MyHeritage displays a warning but the information is still available. In all cases of convolution the user is advised by MyHeritage to view the information on FamilySearch."
My thanks to Mark for his very helpful and enlightening comments.

James Tanner also published comments from MyHeritage yesterday in his post "Answers to some questions about linking MyHeritage and FamilySearch Family Tree"

The issue of "convoluted profiles" (known as IOUS - "individuals of unusual size" on FamilySearch) won't go away soon, since FamilySearch won't work on resolving and merging them, and sorting out the families somehow, until the FamilySearch Family Tree is disconnected from the New.FamilySearch tree system (sometime in 2016?).

2)  In a comment to my post, reader Geolover noted:
"A huge number of the 835,921,086 entries in Family Search Family Tree are duplicates (more or less, with varying errors of many types).
"Does the MyHeritage display indicate when there are duplicate persons, or does it (or the FamilySearch program?) just pick one? If just one is shown, what are the parameters for the pick in research results?"
 I don't know the answer to the question, but the answer may lie in what Mark offered above.  I don't think the MyHeritage display noted that there are duplicate profiles - if there are duplicate profiles unconnected to each other should show up in the MyHeritage search results.

3)  I decided to go looking for historical persons from the 1600s and 1700s, and was unable to find useful profiles for my Mayflower ancestors, for my early Seaver generations, etc.

As an example, here is the MyHeritage profile from FamilySearch Family Tree for my 4th great-grandfather, Benjamin Seaver (1757-1816):


There are no links for relationships to parents, spouses, children, and siblings.  The note at the bottom says:
"There seems to be an issue with this person's relatives.  View the person on FamilySearch to see the information."
I accessed the profile above through a relationship link on the page of his son, Benjamin Seaver.  A search for Benjamin Seaver (1757-1816) in the MyHeritage search engine doesn't find the profile above for some reason.

Okay, here's the Family section of Benjamin Seaver LZYC-SLG:


And at the bottom of the relationships:


There are no "extra" spouses, or extra "parents" for this profile.  I have tried over the past years to resolve duplication, edit profiles, add sources and notes, etc. for my ancestors.  I'm not done with all of them, but this Seaver family is pretty "clean" in my humble opinion.

The same goes for Benjamin;'s parents, Norman Seaver and Sarah Read.  There are no extra relationships, and there are no duplicate profiles.

I looked for about ten profiles for my ancestors born in the 1700-1750 time, and they aren't in the MyHeritage database yet.

4)  I think the right thing to do here is "have patience."  This is a really big task, and MyHeritage isn't finished with it yet.

By the way, the count of FamilySearch Family Tree profiles on MyHeritage is up to:  835,987,832. That's up about 66,000 since yesterday.

I haven't seen any MyHeritage Record Matches for the FamilySearch Family Tree.  It's probably too soon to expect that this week.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/02/more-on-myheritage-searches-of.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


3 comments:

Legacy Tree said...

Thanks for following up on this with even more detail and real examples, and thanks Mark for the additional clarifications on what is and isn't imported.

SAMPUBCO said...

Took a peek and found where the problem is - look at his wife Martha Whitney, she is listed as wife of 4 different men;

Benjamin Seaver born 1791
Benjamin Seaver born 1757
Seaver Benjamin bout about 1760
Asubah Keyes born 1760
Isaac Seaver, born?

This is one of those IOUs to be busted this year.

Randy Seaver said...

David, thanks for the help.

I had previously disconnected Martha Whitney from benjamin Seaver 1791, but this relationship remains for some reason.

I saw only one other relationship for Martha - to an unknown spouse.

I don't see the other three (Seaver Benjamin and Asubah Keyes and Isaac Seaver) on Martha's profile.

There may have been another problem with Martha's parents - two sets were named. I just deleted the wrong relationshis. We'll see if that fixes the problem.