Create 1 or 2 profiles

Question

Looking for opinions on how to handle this.  If you are looking at several sources and you are unsure if you are looking at sources for 1 person or 2 different people what would you do?

So many of the sources of this person make many people believe we are dealing with one individual. It's the death certificate that makes it messy. The mother's maiden name is different and the birth place of his father is wrong.  But of course death certificates can often have incorrect information.

Would you create two separate profiles for the information you can prove for each person?  Then have a research notes to each connecting them to each other. Or would you create 1 profile which research notes explaining why this could be two different people.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

There should be two minimum preferences for creating the second profile:

1. It should be sure that there is a second person and not only wrong informations.
2. There should be enough base information to equip this new profile, especially the clear differenciation to the first one.

Otherwise you get a foggy profile with probably future merge request into the old profile …

So better to sort the information in the research notes until you get the Heureka! 

Answer 2

I would create one profile with research notes. It often helps to have all the information on one profile to sort out what is correct and what isn't!

Answer 3

A third option is to create the one profile you are reasonably sure of and then to use a free space to lay out reasons their could be two people. It's sort of research notes on a separate page. I've done this in the opposite scenario when there was one existing profile that people thought was conflated.

You can do anything you want on the free space to include creating a timeline and writing your thoughts. It is something that you can come back to later.

Answer 4

Thank you all for your help.