What to do with this profile?

Question

In the process of cleaning up some old profiles I have come across a profile created in 2012 by the import of a GEDCOM file. “UNKNOWN Wilson”, Wilson-11142, has no parents, siblings or children, no birth or death date, in fact nothing at all by which they could be identified. What is the best thing to do with this profile?

Comments

Turn it into a profile for one of these

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_surname_Wilson

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If there's no other information, RJ's suggestion is the best.  But first, since it was your import, I'd suggest checking this person in the file you imported, just in case there's a link that got broken during gedcom import.

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Thank you, both, for your help. I’ll do that.

Answer 1

That looks like a candidate for the Lost and Found Project. Clearly, it was uploaded as part of a GEDCOM, but without any links, it looks like that was one of the GEDCOMs which exploded on impact. We have a few tricks for trying to put those back together.

Comments

Thank you, Greg, for the answer.  It looks like great work you’re doing on the Lost and Found Project!  In this case, this is the only disconnected profile I’ve found from the GEDCOM. I don’t have the original file to check but it was most likely carried over from there. As the only data in the profile is the surname, I think recycling is the best option.

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I have actually managed to source and connect profiles with just as little information. I would rather that you give that profile to me than recycle it.

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Okay, Greg, that’s fine with me! I’ll give you the profile.

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I finally got around to looking at this profile. It's the last Wilson profile in that GEDCOM you uploaded. Wilson-11137 to Wilson-11141 are all living. The last non-living Wilson you added before Unknown is George Wilson. Since the rest of the GEDCOM appears to be intact, it doesn't look like it's a matter of an "exploding" GEDCOM.

In my own GEDCOM uploads, when I have ended up with a single isolated profile, or a small isolated cluster of profiles, it turned out to be because I skipped importing a profile from the GEDCOM which turned out to be the only link between that/those isolated profile(s) and the rest of the GEDCOM (and, eventually, the main tree).

There are a couple of possibilities which suggest themselves:

1. On WikiTree, when you add a sibling for an existing profile, the system automatically creates a profile with the same last name and a first name of "Unknown" as the father for the two siblings. If the system you got the GEDCOM from did the same thing, then this unknown profile may be the same kind of placeholder profile.
2. Another possibility is that the profile may represent a Wilson offspring who died before even being named. (I have a couple of cases like that in my own family.) In that case, the profile may have been isolated if the parents already had profiles on WikiTree when you imported the GEDCOM so you skipped them.

If you still have the original data in genealogy software, or another genealogy site, then you may be able to figure out who this profile represents by looking for those kinds of cases.