Abigail Montague (Downing) - Cautionary Note RE: Merging

Started by Private User on Sunday, April 14, 2013
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  • Private User
    Geni Pro

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Private User
4/14/2013 at 6:33 PM

It looks like there have been several bad merges in and around Abigail Montague's profile, resulting in her being confused with a Canadian and, less commonly, a New Yorker by the same married name. It looks like a lot of this is due to multiple inaccurate GEDCOMs that were all merged in together. Particularly baffling is the amount of confusion between this woman and a Revolutionary War soldier named Hugh Ross-Munro.

I've tried to weed out the bad information and have posted a curator's note on the profile to hopefully help avoid further confusion, but I wanted to post on the discussion board as well out of an abundance of caution. I also want to direct attention to Myrtle Steven Hyde's 1999 articles in the ''The American Genealogist'', Vol. 74, Nos. 3 & 4, which seem to provide the definitive research on Abigail.

Private User
4/14/2013 at 6:36 PM

I should also note that I've done something I almost never do, that being locking the basic data fields on her profile. There were so many -- literally a good two dozen -- different proposed data changes and other causes for concern that I felt this to be the best approach for now in order to keep everyone's trees in good shape. If the volume of proposed changes and bad merges goes down, I will happily unlock the fields.

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