I’m reaching out to you with a question about managing events for People with identical surnames and first names. In my genealogy tree, I often encounter situations where I can’t determine which specific Person to associate with a particular Event. For example, when People have the same first name and surname.
How do you tackle such situations in your experience using Gramps? I currently see only one option - creating another temporary Person and associating all the Events that I can’t identify unequivocally. Perhaps adding a prefix like “Temporary” to such People. However, I’d love to hear your advice and ideas, as there might be a better solution.
Another related question is how to effectively mark People that I have analyzed and completed all possible Events. One reasonable solution I see is using a tag, for a Person, “Duplicates Checked.” However, I’m concerned about accumulating too many tags.
What strategies do you use to address ambiguities and maintain order in your genealogical research?
There are many events/sources/citations out there with the same name on them. The job is to match them to the person you are researching.
I’m looking for enough documents to prove their birth and death plus where they resided over time. If they don’t match a DOB or DOD and in the location that is reasonable, they are discarded. I don’t hold onto them looking for someone to attach it to. People don’t get created in my database unless they are connected to someone.
When enough sources/citations have been collected, I tag the person with “sources checked” which means no further action is required. However, if nothing can be found I use “no sources found” which allows me to come back later and do another check. People that I need to research has neither of these tags.
I think that is the point of the question. How to store objects temporarily when there is a pool of potential candidates where the object might match. But only one (or none) of that pool can be a match.
Normally, if you create an event, you should have a date or date range. If they differ, it means they are two different people.
It’s not a problem, if in a few months you realize that these two people are the same person, you can merge them.
By the way, regarding merging persons…
I used to merge them easily, thinking that I wasn’t losing any information. However, recently I realized that it’s not the case. If one person has a spouse and children, and another person doesn’t have anyone, there is a difference in which person to choose as the main one for merging. If I choose the wrong person as the main one, information about the family is lost. This saddens me because now I don’t know if I have lost any family information or not.
Returning to your response, the question is slightly different. I know that individuals can be merged, but I can’t create a new person for every new event just because I might merge them later. That’s not logical. Also, I don’t like the idea that some events won’t be added to anyone just because I’m unsure which of several individuals to assign the event to. I prefer creating a temporary person, marking them as such, and compiling all such events there. In this way, when searching by person, I can easily open 2-3 tabs for all family members and see all their events at once. Later, I can analyze these temporary persons, transfer the events to the main individuals, and delete the temporary ones. It’s not an ideal solution, but at least it’s convenient for working with events; they are immediately accessible without having to search through shared notes or using difficult filters.
In general, as a Gramps software user, I would say that the program lacks a certain entity type, like “Groups.” These could be groups of anything – persons, places, etc. Events could be attached to these groups. In reports, each entity would receive a list of shared events, highlighted separately like as “possibly his” However, I understand that this might be too complex and perhaps an unpopular feature.
You seem to be describing the concept of a persona. When entering data from a given source, you may know that a John Smith was the participant in an event described, but not know which John Smith. The idea is that you create a persona and link it into a person. Ultimately a person can consist entirely of links to personae without having any events listed directly.
The ALIA tag exists in Gedcom for this purpose. However, it is not implemented in Gramps.
We have discussed the persona concept before in relation to source-based data entry.