It’s perfectly normal to have the same person in your genealogical data several times. This may surprise you, but we’ll explain why it’s a – very – good practice!
Why is it better to add a person several times?
When you first identify a person on a deed or in a register, it’s more than likely that you don’t have all the information about them. It’s sometimes impossible to be sure that this person is someone you already know, and to link him or her to other people with certainty.
For example, when searching for the births of people matching a patronymic in departmental archives, you start by consulting the decennial table of births. This is classified by surname, and indicates the first names of each child and their date of birth. But there’s no mention of parentage! As a good genealogist, you can’t lose this information, but you can’t “invent” parentage either. The solution is to add a record for an “isolated” person, i.e. one who is not a descendant, ascendant or spouse in your data. Most genealogy software programs allow you to do this.
Continuing your research, you consult the child’s birth certificate. This time you find the date and place of birth, as well as the identity of the child’s parents. But the parents are not listed with their full identities, i.e. dates and places of birth. If the couple is already known, you could take the risk of linking the person found previously to this couple, but you run the risk of confusing two families! You can believe me: having a paternal family that has remained very localized and comprises several couples with members with the same first and last names, it’s not uncommon for two families to be confused… so the most sensible thing to do is to add this person to a new family, even if it means creating a “duplicate”.
The same example could be used to search for information on marriages or deaths. It is not uncommon for the information given on each register or record to be insufficiently complete to ascertain the identity of the person and be sure that it is the same person.
How can you avoid having the same person appear several times in your genealogy data?
Of course, the aim is to list a person only once in your genealogy.
So you need to regularly look for potential “duplicates”. To do this, you’ll need to search for people according to certain criteria, make comparisons and check for consistency.
If there’s enough overlap to be certain that the same person is involved, then merge the two records. Most genealogy software programs allow you to do this.
If this is not the case, we advise you to make a note in the relevant record stating “Could be a duplicate of xxx” for as long as you have any doubts.
Did you know that there’s a solution for finding duplicates in your genealogy?
This article is part of our series on Questions (and answers) for the genealogist.
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