Geni consistency & plausibility checker

Thanks Erica, I'll add those to the checks.

and baptism date = death date

(it's a mistake I make!)

..."Marriage between near family (may be more likely for royalty)"..
Or religions - early Sephardic jews often married nieces

Jeff said "I am considering making the values something you can change. So if you want to decrease the age warning from 105 to 100, or increase it to 115"

Awesome idea Jeff - that way if we are working in an area of the tree with young marriages we can change the values.

What's about double of "strange movements", somebody born in France from parents born in a small village in Spain married with somebody from that village And lived always in that village. I found that specific problem of wrong birthplace in the past. A warning Will be handy

Unfortunately, I think locations would be too difficult to deal with.

Jeff,

How about distance between places related to time between dates for those locations?
If you limit it to to profile itself and directly linked profiles and may be not for dates in the last century, you might be able to spot problems like multiple places with the same name where Google picked the wrong one.

Might be able to do something with lat and long. Comparing text base location values is difficult and requires understanding, but lat / long values are easy.

What I found is that, normally, appart from real inmigration cases, is vary rare that people moves from the region.

I will associate as well to means of transportation, in XX century is more common, but very rare in profiles before XIX century. You might also include this threshold (or make it optional) to avoid too many warnings

SmartCopy 4.0 has been pushed out. It includes these consistency checks. Let me know if you have any issues.

* Age different between partners is significant
* Maiden name same as husband's last name
* Husband and wife death dates the same
* Husband death date same as marriage date
* Wife death date same as marriage date
* Born after marriage
* Died before marriage
* Implausible marriage age, too young
* Siblings ages too close together
* Born before parent birth
* Born after parent death
* Death date same as baptism date
* Parent too young for child's birth
* Mother too old for child's birth
* Born before parent marriage
* Excessive Age
* Born after death
* Name contains double space
* Name contains alias
* Name contains improper use of uppercase/lowercase
* Maiden Name contains improper use of uppercase/lowercase
* Last Name contains improper use of uppercase/lowercase
* First Name contains improper use of lowercase
* First Name ends in suffix (eg. 'i','ii','iii','iv','jr','sr')
* Salutation in title (eg. 'Mr', 'Mrs')

Thanks for the push! (and let the complaints begin...)
- Death-before-birth needs to consider date vs year-only. Example: Karen Arntsdatter Kvesetberget - she died before the end of the year in which she was born, but gets flagged as wrong.
- I think 45 years may be too low for "mother's age at last child". I get multiple warnings about this; wanted to flag it before changing my own setting. In pre-contraception times, I think children were born right up to menopause; Wikipedia says that "Menopause typically occurs between 49 and 52 years of age". I'd suggest starting with a limit of 55 and lowering it as we get more experience.

Thanks Harald, I'll consider how to best deal with the year, since the tools to compare dates always set a year entry to Jan 1. They consider dates a point in time, a not range.

I'll update the default on the birth age.

I also think "born before the parents married" is near the top of my list of "we really need to mute this warning per profile". It occured *very* frequently in Norway.

For date comparision, a standard tactic if you can't recognize Jan 1 in code would be to add a year to the death date.

I pushed a 4.0.1 update for your 11:35 post, which should address those two issues.

For the info, I agree that would probably be one that we could create a separate toggle option. Default to on or off?

I'd default to off until we have a method for saying "this birth occured before the parents were married, and it's OK".

I pushed 4.0.2 with an sub-option for turning on / off the child born before marriage - defaults to off.

Wonder if I should exclude similar years in a sibling check as well. If they're both the same year with no other info, it will consider them twins as they're both Jan 1, YYYY. But if one is Feb 4, 1888 and the other is just 1888, it will consider them as too close. Or maybe it would be a good prompt to better define it as 1887, 1889 or circa late 1888.

This 'nearby' birth date check is (I've already found to be) a useful one, as it helps point out the potential "mixing" of families ... but also has the false-positive issue.

Maybe it should only warn if there is at least a month present in both dates being compared -- if the date functions will let you check for that.

4.0.3 caught two pairs of siblings ages too close together this evening ... Good thing Ancestry bought the Social Security Applications index, because birth years were wrong on regular SSDI records and gravestones, which is what I went by. Looking more closely at the Censuses, I might have been able to find the errors, but the SSAI has proven to be an excellent tool for listing parent names and actual post offices of births (not just counties, as was the fashion in many of the Southern states).

Another "please let me turn this off" check:

"Birth Surname of Elin Alvestrand is the same as the last name of her husband Harald Tveit Alvestrand (Tveit)."

I changed my last name to her last name when we married. A special case for "don't trigger this warning when the name-at-birth of the husband is different from his current last name" would cover this partiuclar case.

Another nit:
"Birth Surname of Vernon Holmes Olsen is the same as the last name of his husband Vernon Olsen." - this occured on a 4-parent profile. It appears that the consistency checker compares the 2 first entries in the parent list, not the parents that are matched to each other.
Suggested fix: Don't check this when there are > 2 parents.

my dream would be when "contains incorrect use of uppercase/lowercase in his last name." appears you could just click a button and it changes it automatically to lower case

Jason +1

Good ideas, I'll work on including them.

There is another Configuration option that I added in 4.0 called "Geni Customization". Start thinking about how we might be able to use this to improve your experience.

Geni has a task of creating a social and genealogy product that is easy and accessible to a large range of users, with vast experience levels. Sometimes this leaves power genealogy users wanting more or less of certain things. Geni Customization is a way we might be able to make some of those changes.

Let me lay out some ground rules and limitations.

I don't want a customization to effect Geni's monetary model. So if you're a user and clicking on something leads you to a paywall, I'm not changing or hiding that. If I can validate a subscription (Pro or Data), I could see additional options, for example, such as moving the Confirmed Matches profile carousel into a tab. We need a good Geni ecosystem, so no effecting the bottom line.

One thing that is currently inaccessible is the Flash tree. So, for example, I can't inject dna markers into Treeview, thought that would be cool. But everything else, including the popup windows in tree view, are something we might be able to add to. Also, let's keep things reasonable and be mindful of any possible impact to Geni Customer Service. I don't want this to be a free-for-all tweak-fest. I expect all these customizations will be off by default.

How exciting!

I'd like to get an alert if any profile on the page (especially in treeview) is tagged in one of the projects that I'm interested in. I may not want every single project that I follow (or it'd be too overwhelming) so a customized checklist would be good.

Not sure how it would work if we can't add markers into flash tree.

(1) Keep in mind, folks, that the current design of the "Geni enhancement" tool (SmartCopy, FamilyChecks - name I just 'coined') is that it looks ONLY at the focus profile and the immediately connected family (parents, siblings, spouses, children). So any thoughts involving a set of profiles beyond that would probably be an enhancement to, say, the HistorySearch or Ancestor/Descendant-Graph tools.

Having noted that ...

(2) I would find it useful to be able to get a list of the profiles with the Relationship Lock set. (in liu of adding a marker to the TreeView); the advantage of a list would be it'd be useful from Profile View as well.

I want to call out Jeff for all the work he has done for our enjoyment and edification with Smart Copy and the Consistency checker. Amazing, useful, interesting and satisfying software. Thank you Jeff!!

I endorse everything Dan Brockman has said, as usual great job Jeff and Dan