Managing reference checking

I’m wondering how people remember they have checked a reference in Lost Cousins. Especially if you have hundreds of entries entered.

As Peter has mentioned many times it is vital that users go through each household and check that the reference is correct. Otherwise your Lost Cousins are never going to connect with you. However this can be a tedious process and I can’t see anyway to remind you which entries have been checked and which haven’t.

Since my family is mostly Scotland I typically have only one option to enter my references so I probably have less entries than most members. So I can only imagine that having a large number of entries becomes really tricky to manage and to ensure you have checked every entry.

I’m hoping there is a viable method of checking and that everyone checks. However I suspect similar to taking the time to enter every reference many members have yet to check more than a few households and might even have forgotten which ones they are or how far they got.

My fear is that the system breaks down if you don’t make sure you have the right entries and because I can’t see how to check I’ve confirmed an entry I suspect that like me most members don’t check.

I’d love to be able to automate this with FTAnalyzer however I can’t as there is nothing to say an entry has been checked or not on the website. So whether you are a pencil and paper researcher or a fully computerised researcher. I can’t see how anyone keeps track of who they have checked. To me it’s far far to manual a process to bother with. So I assume I’m missing some simple step.

Can anyone help out.

 

Alex after uploading my first set of data I put the entries in Lost Cousins in household order and checked all that were marked as having been uploaded via FTAnalyzer .
This will not work on my subsequent uploads so I will be using your export to Excel option from the Potential Records report to give me a list to work through on LC
I have data to check before I do this including the records on your Invalid Census reference report.

 

Having a user select records may be possible however it is even MORE manual processing than what we have at present and my aim is to REDUCE the amount of manual effort not increase it. Adding a maximum upload would work and would be relatively simple to add.

However it still begs the question how do you know you have actually checked a record? That was my query. To me there is no means of knowing you have checked the record or not thus no means of keeping track of whether you need to check the record.

 

Consider the following. On the my ancestors page there is a button that links to the FMP record. What if you could manually tick a box on the website to say that record is checked then everyone in the household gets a green button that links to FMP record instead of a black one. Would that not make it really easy to see which ones were unchecked and which ones were checked. Then it wouldn't matter how many were uploaded. You'd see at a glance what needed checked.

Perhaps more importantly for the less enthusiastic users it would provide a simple means to remind them they have records needing checked. Having users check records and having that process be simple helps everyone and improves the overall quality of the data at the same time. All it takes is a tick box on the website.

 

In a case like this you ideally need to connect with the new cousin and agree with them what the correct version is - then both make the changes.

The important thing to remember is that there could be other cousins who neither of you are matching.

 

I agree with you Alexander, having a visual aid on the LC website would be extremely helpful to people who manually enter or use FTanalyzer to load their relatives.

It would also help you Peter, you would be able to see how many people have checked and have a greater understnading of the accuracy of your database.
You could even show a user what their accuracy was, on the My Summary page, you could say something like "You have only checked 42 out of 101 Households"

I understand space might be a premium on the My Ancestors page, but you could have a field on the Edit Ancestor page? And then as Alexander suggested, once the radio button is ticked there, it changes the grey arrow button on the My Ancestors page to Green?

 

There is already a fairly simple solution - the My Ancestors page can be sorted in order of Date of entry so it's easy to see the most recent entries, which will be the ones that haven't been checked previously (if necessary the data and time of each entry can be found by clicking Show more detail).

For the majority who input their relatives manually (and, realistically, are likely to continue to do so) the best time to check their entry is at the rime of input, specifically after entering the head of household - since if there is an error in the census references only one entry needs to be changed.

Anything further just complicates things - and is likely to create additional work for those who have been conscientiously checking their entries all along.

From a practical point of view it would further increase the complexity of the My Ancestors page, and whilst it's hard to estimate what the impact on processing time would be, it could potentially lead to time-out errors, something we've only just managed to get rid of after two years of problems for our most dedicated users.

There are also programming issues but I won't go into them at this stage.

 

Fair enough I'll withdraw the verification tab and stop all further development on Lost Cousins features. There's simply no point in me wasting my time if no assistance is going to be given. I tried but I really don't know why I bothered.

 

Peter, how many manual entries were added to your database before you added the grey check arrow? There must a huge amount of people who have added thousands of households that have never been checked.

Your fairly simple solution does not work for your existing members, it only works for new members.

If people have 2 ways of adding data to LC

1. Manually add the head, 20 seconds, check the census refs, 20 seconds, add 5 remaining members 50 seconds which comes to 1 min 30 seconds, (and I think I've been overly conservative here)
2. Use FTAnalyzer to load 6 people, 2 seconds, check the census refs, 20 seconds, which comes to 22 seconds.

Why are they not going to choose or want to use the quicker option? How many of your members or potential new members have thousands of relatives they could add but are put off by the time it takes to manually add hundreds of households? 99% of people use family tree software and all the information they need is readily available, and has been demonstrated, loads very quickly and easily into LC.

As you correctly mention in your Newsletters, your members tend not to be newbies, they are established genealogists with huge trees. Maybe you should do a poll and ask your Newsletter readers why they don't load their relatives? Because if I came to your site today with over 3,600 people to load, then I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do it. Maybe I'd load my direct ancestors.

You have a great opportunity here to take a huge step forward in the number of records added, the number of active paying members and the accuracy of your records. I implore you to work out a simple solution that works for you and works for FTAnalyzer load.

 

Trivial. The icon would not be green as the icon would not exist.