Joseph Carpenter and Hannah Carpenter (circa 1630/1640)

I'd like to propose that we work on untangling some of the Carpenter Ancestors that are horribly intertwined right now on Geni. I personally think that the curators did a **GREAT** job at putting a note above William "of Rehoboth" Carpenter 's profile to help differentiate him from the 'other' William Carpenter's of the same era. I believe a similar notation on some of the more confused profiles would help tremendously too. Who can add these notes? Curators?

I am noticing that in particular, there are two Joseph Carpenter's from this era and one is the brother of Hannah Carpenter Hannah Carpenter, and one is the husband (and cousin!) of the same Hannah Carpenter. Due to this confusion, I am seeing that siblings and everything else that propagates downwards from this is not entirely correct as some users are not noticing the subtle distinction between these two Joseph Carpenter's. (Heck, it took me a little while to recognize that these were two separate individuals!). For example, I am seeing some siblings that belong to Joseph#1 being assigned to Joseph #2, and dates and other supporting data points are also a hybrid of the two.

Although I have been on Geni for quite a while as a Pro user, this is my first project, and I am a little gun shy about going in and splitting the tree, and attempting to reconnect it correctly.
Does anyone have experience in this regard?
What is the best way to do this?
Are there special tools that the curators have that make this exercise easier?

Kind of a bigger question nagging in the back of my mind is given the collaborative nature of Geni, how do we prevent future users from going back in and proposing (and accepting!) new merges to simply undo everything that we straighten out? Do we just have to accept that possibility that are hard work can be changed by someone (intentionally or through innocent mistakes)? At some point I would think that profiles (MP?) get locked down once all the data has been vetted and verified....

Anyway, back to these two Joe's.....
I have the data and supporting documentation that delineates the differences between these two, but I am not sure what the next step is?

I **do** think that putting a similar disclaimer on BOTH profiles would go a long way to helping those who come later to understand the difference and to which branch they may belong.

Thoughts?

Joseph Carpenter
Joseph Carpenter
(The most glaring duplication is that they both list Hannah Carpenter as a wife, but there's so much more that's wrong....)

Joseph Carpenter

Yours truly
Joe Carpenter (Yeah, the irony isn't lost on me!)

Joe, thank you so much for posting about this! A couple of us curators are aware of the huge Carpenter mess and are working on untangling it. I'm mostly away from Geni right now and accessing the site from my phone, but Erica Horton should arrive shortly to give her input.

A lot of the problems stem from bad merges, so some of it might be easiest to fix by waiting just a little bit longer for merge undo to be released. I'll look at the profiles you linked, however, to see if there's anything else we can do for now.

Howton! Autocorrect is terrible.

Tell me about that auto correct!

More complete reversion tools are in the works, but I have a whole carpentry set on my curator ID to help out. Suggestions.

- upload documents to support sourced facts. At merge time it makes a lot of difference. Also, procedurally, it's building a profile from the facts on out.

- cite sources in the overview.

- post links (URLs of the profiles) to a discussion, makes it a whole lot easier to find.

- use the display name field to disambiguate similar names. As you can see, topographics are really helpful.

- you can't merge

You can't merge two master profiles together. Once we're sure there's a good shell, we can start from there.

Search the geni database for duplicates. I've found all kinds of helpful tidbits lurking there.

To answer the locked fields question, that's recently been implemented. I won't lock a field down until sourced, of course. The beauty of the tool is that it's field by field, so if you only have found a baptism date / place, for example, we can go ahead and lock that field, leaving,csay, death date for further research.