One of the many areas where Family Tree Maker is a big, fat slacker is error reports. I ran an error report in Legacy Family Tree, and it was 40+ pages long, with about 10 errors per page.
After working for 8 hours, I had 5 errors resolved. At this rate, data clean-up is going to take me the rest of my life.
One of the errors is something I should have caught as I was entering the information. A child (Thomas) was allegedly born several years after the father’s death. Either the father’s death date is wrong, or the son’s birth date is wrong, or both. Or the father is not actually the father. Possible, but there is no reason to suspect that’s the explanation. Much more likely that the dates are incorrect.
In trying to clean up the problem, I came across hundreds of family trees at Ancestry and Rootsweb containing the impossible dates. Do people not logic-check their work?
Turns out, it looks like the father probably died in 1645, making Thomas’ 1644 birth date reasonable. There are other problems with the screenshot, though. Additional children (Edward and George? I have no idea if they are legit. Likely not.) and several duplicates. Additionally, I think Sarah and Phebe may be the same person.
red paper boat 