Geni consistency & plausibility checker

Richard (Rick) Gary Simon I have a funny story on myself you might appreciate.

My grandmother emigrated from Odessa in Russia when she was 10 years old or so (the “or so” is that she took the opportunity of no birth records to shave a year, or two, from her age).

It took until around the year 2009 for us to realize that Odessa is now in Ukraine.

Everyone had to amend their family stories and we’re now entirely unclear.

Erica - Thanks for telling me your story. This is REALLY a small world - My ggrandfather (my dad's, dad's, dad) came from Reni (near Odessa), Ukraine in the 1880's or 90's. !!!!!!

Also, it was NOT unusual for that generation to CONSISTENTLY lie about age - my Mom's Dad never gave his birth date the same - we know of at least 3 major "lies" on important documents (like Army enlistment papers) My grandmother (his wife) always swore she had the correct one - we are not sure whether we should believe her or not. She died in 1984.

FUN keeping all of this straight ....

Another syntax I use is similar to Erica's, but I place the "now" portion on the 'previous' detail field, such as this generic Virginia vs. West Virginia example

County: 'old-county', now 'new-county', VA
State: West Virginia
Country: United States ... {if post 7/4/1776}

I think it doesn't read as smoothly to have:

'old-county' (now 'new-county'), Virginia (now West Virginia), United States
vs.
'old-county', now 'new-county', VA, now, West Virginia, United States

... but that's just my preference -- which is largely also driven by the way it shows up in Ancestor/Descendant graphs <smile>.

SC is not identifying ELIN Maria Karlsson and her siblings as having incorrect capitalisation, i see her First name as "ELIN Maria". I do not know if the "Maria" belongs in the Middle Name field.

I guess it sees a mixture of upper and lower case and assumes it is correct whereas human eye can instantly spot the issue? I assume if "Maria" was moved to Middle Name field then SC would flag "ELIN" as a problem.

Alex Moes, same issue exists with McMANN - if there is a mix of upper and lower case in the field, SC does not pick it up.

I just fix those manually.

To me it does not appear important on Geni whether the information is correct or not!! just put it in there, while trying to trace my Family Tree on Geni the spelling of the name Jeffries has been changed to Jeffreys even though the ship records and Ticket of Leave as well as Birth records show the name as spelt Jeffries?? I think this is so people can claim a Convict in their Family Tree, and because they have entered the information first it is taken as Gospel.

No system can tell if a name is spelt correctly - if it is convict era a lot of people had poor or no literacy skills so spelling was far more fluid than today.

If you think a name is spel incorrectly you can start a discussion about it and you can add your substantiation and they can add theirs and together you can come to a consensus on which spelling to use.

I have one profile that i have primary substantiation documentations for 10 different dates - so sometimes you have to use one and note all the rest.

Today's wishlist item:
Could we have the case-converting "fix this" button apply to Norwegian names as well as English names?
This weekend I encountered an area where all the English names were spelled in Normal Case, but they were also entered in Norwegian in all lower case - the checker reported the problem, but didn't offer a "fix" button.

It's not just the spelling, by changing the spelling children have been added to the tree which brings in the Jeffreys name. By doing this they have melded their tree to mine as I know one of my ancesters only had 5 children however 4 more where added with the name Jeffreys even though BDM records show they did not have these children.

Francis, if you go to https://www.geni.com/discussions/172007 a curator can help you to reverse an incorrect merge. Alternatively you can send me a link to the profile and i can have a look.

My wish for the new year. Geni consistency & plausibility checker integrated directly into Geni for all users and remuneration to Jeff for all his hard work on it

Eldon - I think that is a tremendous idea !!

A great idea!
Fingers crossed :-)

Nah, - people tends to cut connections or ask them to be cut because dates does not match instead of asking if the dates is correct.

Harald Tveit Alvestrand,
I suspect it's an API issue. I don't think the API really supports the multi-language feature. I sometimes get the "bad case" error for Hebrew values. Hebrew does NOT have "case" for letters...

[In Smart-Copy it will always update the default "English" fields instead of putting non-alphabetical texts into a different language option.

Shmuel-Aharon Kam (Kahn / שמואל-אהרן קם (קאן that's why I asked specifically for Norwegian :-)
Wouldn't want to be caught case-fixing Hebrew (or Arabic or Sanskrit, but might do it for Russian Cyrillic.....)

If it's the API's limitation, I suspect we might want to raise an API bug instead.

I'm pretty sure API is able to call and update names in all languages that the profile has (I've done it a lot lately). If there's example, don't fix, so that it'll be easier for Jeff to investigate.

Thank you for SmartCopy and the especially the Consistency Checker function. CC has caught numerous transcription errors, missed generations, out of order dates, and other simple things that humans miss but the computer finds for us.

It is very easy to copy paste a CC notation, send it to the Manager of a profile with issues and watch for corrections to the great Big World Tree. Fantastic timesaver and it removes the hesitation we have to tell someone else that they made a mistake.Thank you.

The Consistency Checker, reports a "Missing month" If I enter a birth date "July 1900" as an example..

Donovan:

Does it make a difference if the date is entered as "text-month YYYY" vs. "mm,YYYY"?

I've come across older (existing) profiles where it appears the original 'parsing' interpreted "mm, YYYY" as "dd, YYYY" ... and stored that way ... but it displays as "text-month, YYYY"!

Re-entering the month+year seems to "fix" the date fields and the 'consistency check' is then satisfied.

That 'interpreting month-only as a day' problem doesn't seem to happen for "new" profiles.

Dan Cornett,

I have seen something like that. Do you know how new the profile must be not to have this problem?

I also noticed a problem when entering dates with a month is letters.
I switch from English to Dutch and back again frequently.
When I use English and enter a month in Dutch (like okt instead of oct) it will not complain, but the month will be empty. It would help a lot if Geni would complain when entering or saving a date like that.

I think the parsing of nn/mmmm gets parsed correctly to Month + Year always now.

I vaguely recall that there was an earlier time (years ago) when that syntax put the first two digits into the "day of the month" field rather than the month field. The display of the value got "fixed", but the underlying data issue wasn't touched. Re-entering the data will "correct" the problem by putting the data into the correct fields.

Don't know when that parsing issue was 'fixed'.

And ... you may have hit on the other reason -- the "month" not being a recognized "month" (in the current 'language') and thus ignored rather than "complaining" about it.

Dan, thanks.
Is that something you can rase with Geni engineers? I see a lot of problems with a missing month.

Private User, if you have a link to a profile that is reporting that, please post so I can check what the API is sending. In the past, I've actually seen where the month was in the day field, but Geni was still reporting it as month. I expect if you reentered the date and saved, it would go away, but I'd like to check to see what Geni is reporting on the back end.

I just confirmed that an "invalid" textual month, such as "NOC" instead of "NOV", will cause the day & year to be recorded, but not the month.

No Geni error message.

That also means that one can NOT assume that a value of, say "2/1850" means February of 1950. If the Consistency Checker reports no month, then that literally means "the 2nd day of some month in 1850".

If there is at least one SmartCopy link, hopefully one can re-find the actual month. Otherwise, I guess the best thing is to note that "day of the month" at the beginning of the About and set the date to just the year. Sigh.

I've posted a 'bug report' to Geni.

This is a SmartCopy 'bug' - or enhancement, if you will.

Two birth dates one day apart should perhaps NOT show as different? It's not unusual to have twins born +/- midnight.

Example: https://www.geni.com/family-tree/index/6000000040877231848

Don't forget about Dec 31-Jan1, either. Less common, of course, but still "valid".