[Ger-Poland-Volhynia] Gatzke and Szatkowski

[Gary Warner]

To all,

Based on the comments received from several of you, we decided to 
unravel about 250 records in the Master Pedigree Database that showed 
Gatzke as the primary name and Szatkowski as an alternate.   Those names 
will now be two separate names (of the total, 17 are now Szatkowski 
names) the next time we make an upload of data to the MPD on the website 
(hopefully in the next few weeks).

The above correction came about because some submitted records showed 
the same people with two different surnames.   Research by several of 
the SGGEE volunteers has determined that the different names were an 
error on some of the records.

Be aware that the MPD is a work in progress.  Accordingly:

1. The MPD represents what we hope is a reasonable guess on our part as 
to what records are really the same individuals, and correctness depends 
firstly on the data you submit.

2.  Sometimes the submitted data conflicts with other data in the MPD 
for the same person, and we try to resolve the conflict during a merge.  
Unresolved conflicts of data for persons we determine are the same 
people always wind up with an "or" separating a date, or a location, or 
a given name, or a surname when we cannot resolve the conflict.

3.  Sometimes we miss merging data, and sometimes we make mistakes in 
merging data that should not be merged.   To put this into perspective, 
there are currently about 530,000 records in the MPD- imagine those 
records as individual pieces of straw in a straw pile that all need to 
be compared to see if they match.   If you see an error, please point it 
out to us.

4.  The process of combining records in a merge of data is not an 
automatic one, and it involves humans who sometimes make mistakes.  We 
ask your forgiveness and understanding for those mistakes, now and always.

Thanks for all your help.

Gary Warner
SGGEE Databases Manager