To merge or not to merge -- Is that a question?

Hubble Astronomer Creates Spectacular Galaxy Collision Visualization for the National Air and Space Museum by *Credit:* F. Summers (Space Telescope Science Institute [ http://www.stsci.edu/ ]), C. Mihos (Case Western Reserve University), L. Hernquist (Harvard University)

My apologies to Shakespeare, but we now have a relatively open field for merging duplicates in the FamilySearch.org Family Tree and this is creating a lot of work for some of us and lot of work and questions from others. Using the FindARecord.com program, I have almost eliminated all the duplicated in my first six generations. I have started back eight or nine generations but it is getting harder and harder to find an example to use for a blog post. Here is a screenshot of the FindARecord.com search on six generations from my Grandfather:

From here, you can click on the person's ID number and go directly to the person in the Family Tree. Here is the first person on the list:

At this point, you need to click on the "Possible Duplicates" link.

Now, look carefully at the entries. Both of these John Bryants were born in England. My ancestor was born in New South Wales, Australia. Neither of these is a duplicate. Now, it is possible that they were entered under the impression that my John Bryant was born in England, but there is no way to conclude that they are the same person, especially with the entry that has the wife listed as Mrs. John Bryant. So in this case, I will indicate that both of these proffered duplicates are "Not a Match."

To finish the process, I go back to FindARecord.com and mark the link as "Fixed."

In just a few minutes you can work your way through several potential duplicates, but as you can see from this example, the possible duplicates may not be duplicates at all.