Another Way to Find Errors in Your Family Tree

I've added so many people to my family tree this year! I synchronized my Family Tree Maker (FTM) file with Ancestry on Sunday morning. It said I'd added 310 people the day before. That's a new record! I decided it was time for a thorough error check.

FTM has a built-in error report, and I wanted to compare it to that of Family Tree Analyzer. The differences surprised me. The second listing I saw on my FTM error report was for Harold Gibbons. He had a duplicate birth fact that Family Tree Analyzer didn't see.

When I took a look at Harold Gibbons in my tree, I saw both 22 Sep 1899 and 26 Sep 1899 listed as his birth date. One date came from an index of New York City births. The other came from a World War I draft registration card.

The birth index said Harold's 1899 Manhattan birth certificate number was 37387. The NYC Municipal Archives has digitized their vital records, and they're available online. So I checked to see when Harold, my cousin Rod's uncle, was really born.

This report gives a different account of the errors—or possible errors—in your family tree.

When I saw his birth record, his name showed my first problem. The certificate says Harold T. Gibbons. (Why didn't they spell out his middle name?) The WWI draft registration card I'd saved for him says Harold Patrick Gibbons.

I checked the parents on the birth certificate to see if they were a match. Yes: John Gibbons and Lillian Lanigan are the parents I expected to find. The certificate shows the date of birth as 26 Sep 1899—that agrees with the NYC birth index, but not the WWI draft card.

Now I knew that draft card belonged to another man. Ironically, I had researched the wrong Harold's place of work. I even included a photograph of the building and a description of the business.

I deleted the draft card, building photo, and the facts for the wrong Harold. Now the right Harold's birth certificate is there to document his date and place of birth.

And that was only the first item I checked from the error report.

How to Create Your Error Report

If you use Family Tree Maker:

• Click the Publish tab at the top of the program.
• Click Person Reports in the left column and choose Data Errors Report.
• Click Create Report, then click Cancel to make some enhancements:
  • Choose to include All individuals.
  • Click the first button under Data Errors Report Options to open the Errors to Include dialog box. I chose to deselect two choices:
    • Spouses have the same last name (so what?)
    • Marriage date missing (that's because the document is not available)
• Close the dialog box, click Generate Report, and wait.

Be patient if you have a big family tree. Go have some tea and cookies.

Family Tree Maker has a built-in error report that may surprised you with its findings.

My report showed a ton of duplicate marriage bann errors, but that isn't an error. I always record two marriage banns for marriages in Italy. That's their marriage process. I wanted to remove these entries from my report. I needed a spreadsheet. I clicked the Share button in the top right corner of Family Tree Maker and chose to Export to CSV file.

Open your CSV file with any spreadsheet software and sort it by error type. Then delete any lines with errors you know you don't need to fix. Then jump in and start checking errors. Delete each line you review/fix, and whittle down the number of errors to check.

If your list is really long, don't get upset. Some items will be non-errors. For example, I see I have a bunch of possible duplicate names. Some documents list a person by different names, and we want to note that. I expect to keep those.

I'm actually happy to see a group of errors that look like this:

Possible duplicate event: Name
Possible duplicate event: Sex
Possible duplicate event: Death
Possible duplicate event: Birth

These duplicates happened in 2019 when my FTM file suffered a disaster. I fix these duplicates whenever I see them, but now, finally, I can get rid of them all.

Use the error report in your family tree software and find mistakes you never knew were there.