The three sons of Welles-324 are actually all the same person. This was spotted some time ago but the merges are stuck. In Burkes he was apparently called William, but Complete Peerage and other sources now call him Robert. There are also two versions of his wife, one misunderstands her married name as an LNAB. The merge of those wives has also been rejected.
What makes this more important is that there are several generations of descendants which are also duplicated - a Burkes line and a Complete Peerage line. Typically when we have a whole line needing merges we want to start at the top so that we don't permanently disconnect a profile from the tree by accident. So there is quite a lot of work to be done, and this has been identified some time ago, but we can not move ahead with the first steps, because the Burkes type profiles are poorly sourced and not easy to equate to ANY profile. (One has no dates at all, somehow.)
This is one of those cases where Wikitree in effect seems to demand that profiles need to look the same, and both have good sources, before a merge is allowed. This means that poorly sourced profiles can get stuck. In practice what therefore happens is that we need to first copy what is on the better article, and make all the profiles look identical and then the merge is simple and obvious.
HOWEVER, I've also seen this approach criticized here on Wikitree, as incorrect. So should we just make all the profiles identical first, in order to get merges approved, or not?
On 12 Apr 2024 Andrew Lancaster wrote on Welles-316:
This profile 316 does have good sources. 601 is a mistaken version of this profile, so if this is a reason not to merge then we are stuck in a Catch 22. What should we do with 601? There are no real details on 601 except the family connections and the first name, so there is no real conflict of information. (Note that the name of this profile here was already corrected from William to Robert.) Potentially we can adapt 601 to match this profile and let the merge go ahead but I know many wikitreers see that as an incorrect approach. If we do not merge 601 then we just need to cut it loose from the real people. However, the wife and descendants of 601 will all need to be merged to this line, and while it is not clear what to do with their ancestor this process could be held up?
