We are already mid-September, with perhaps the last monsoon rains of the Arizona summer season due tonight and tomorrow. I’m also sitting at home with my husband, son and I all down with Covid. Thankfully, we all have mild cases and that’s with no Paxlovid. It’s our second go-around, with the first back in April 2023.

However, on to more pleasant topics, like Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver.

Here’s this week’s challenge, which I suggested to Randy (mostly to make me face this task):

1)  Have you used helps such as Tree Checker on Ancestry, Consistency Check on MyHeritage, or the Family Tree Analyzer program to check for errors in your family tree? 

I have never used Ancestry’s tree checker, mainly because I do all my work in my genealogy software program.

I have used MyHeritage’s Tree Consistency Checker because I have updated trees uploaded on MyHeritage and I get emails every so often telling me how many items I need to check. I think the most recent total was something like 597, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

That’s because if, say, an ancestor reported giving birth to 15 children, with 8 living, and I don’t know who the other 7 are, I enter “Child” as the name and estimate some reasonable years of birth. Because I don’t know whether the child was male or female, those 7 entries show up in the list of possible errors.

I have used Family Tree Analyzer a couple of times, too. It’s free, which is always good. I learned about that program from DiAnn Iamarino Ohama who blogs Fortify Your Family Tree. I’ve actually spent more time using FTAnalyzer because it’s very easy to use.

Now, my problem is sticking with one of them to look at and decide what is really an error (like perhaps a typo with transposed numbers in a year) or not, like a child who died young with no sex identified.

Family Tree Analyzer produces a different list than the Tree Consistency Checker on MyHeritage. Again, some of the “errors” aren’t really errors. For example, I’m told that 1 February 1860 isn’t a supported census date. Well, the census was taken in Denmark and that was the official census date.

It also tells me that 1869 isn’t a supported census date. Again, yes, it is, because the census was taken in the old Hungarian empire.

I really need to spend time with both of these programs and make a concerted effort to get through both lists. I can them determine which are really errors and which are not.

I do appreciate that both programs find outright mistakes and identify items that aren’t really errors because I can go back in my tree and fix what is really wrong. Most of my actual errors seem to be transposed numbers in years.

I think I’m going to put this on my “to do” for THIS WEEK since I am stuck at home isolating until the end of next week!

Thanks, Randy, for providing fun and interesting challenges for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.