Occasionally I’ll find a duplicate individual with no material facts. Is it OK to simply delete the individual, or is it highly preferrable to merge with the ‘real’ one? Again, assuming the dupe has no information worth retaining.
I ask because I believe I’ve seen comments here in the past to never delete, or at least, it’s strongly discouraged.
If you can really confirm there is no need for the duplicate person or their relationships then you can safely delete them. I think the reason many recommend merging is simply because we never know how thoroughly another person will check data and relationships.
there are several reasons never delete and to merge.
The bottom line is if you are comfortable – delete – with the caveat the only UNDO button is restore. I have left people in for years and later found how they belonged
My most important reason always to merge rather than to delete is that I don’t fully trust the user - namely, myself - not to make mistakes. If I merge rather than delete, then I know that any fact, alternate name, media, citation, spouse connection, or child/parent connection will still be there somewhere.
I’m a very careful and very detailed oriented user, but I still make mistakes. To me, part of being very careful and very detailed oriented is not just to minimize mistakes, but to minimize even the possibility of mistakes. And I think that merging rather than deleting accomplishes that goal. I’m a sample size of one, and your mileage may vary.
I like the idea of merge vs delete - but that seems to add duplicate details - like the same children listed twice, two sets of parents. What am I doing wrong?
You need to merge all the duplicates in the family CAREFULLY one by one. It is always wise to backup your database before you start this series of merges. It is easy to make a mistake.
Those duplicate details were surely already there in a sense before starting to merge or delete. For example, you might have two William Smiths who were really the same person, each the son of a different John Smith and a different Elizabeth Jones, both of whom were really the same respective persons. But depending on how the various people were all linked together, I suspect that not all of the duplicate details would be deleted by doing deletes instead of merges. It’s hard to totally generalize about such things.
But again (and as a sample size of one), I would rather cleanup those duplicate details after a merge than have any of those details be lost after a delete. And if you do all the merges before cleaning up the duplicate details, some if not many of the duplicate details might go away automatically.
agreed. Unless one is 100% certain - generally better not to delete - and even if merging – one should beat least 99.8 % sure