UPDATE: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Run a "Problem Search" On Your Family Tree

NOTE:  Well, it looks like I suggested this topic last in October 2023.  And several times before that over 18 years.  If you did this in October 2023, post a link in Comments, and then go work on your research and write a blog post to tell us about it!

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  Have you run a "Problem Search," "Problem List," or "Consistency Check" or similar in your genealogy software or online family tree?  Do it now, and tell us which program or online tree you used and what your results were.

2) Tell us what you found when you ran a problem list in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status  post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Here's mine:

I use RootsMagic 9 and in the "Tools" menu, there is a "Problem Search" item.  I clicked on the link to "Run selected tool" in the upper left-hand corner, and saw many possible problems that the program will search for:

In the screen above, I selected the problems I consider the most likely to be wrong.  I chose:

*  Born before parent's birth

*  Born after mother's death

*  Age at death should be less than 110 

*  Age at marriage should be between 12 and 90

*  Mother's age should be between 12 and 55

Here is the result (I got a much longer list one year ago, and fixed most of them):

I need to evaluate all of these problems.  The two that stand out is the one for "2 years old when married" and "Mother born after person's birth."

In the other problem areas, the child's birth date, or the mother's birth date, may be approximated or entered wrong - a critical evaluation is needed.  

Before posting this blog, I checked every item on my list and made adjustments in the tree as necessary.  Several of the early marriages on the list were caused by having a baptism date as the birth date of the mother.

I could have done this in other programs - I know that Legacy Family Tree and Family Tree Maker have a similar list, and the Ancestry and MyHeritage have consistency checkers for their trees (may require a subscription). 

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