Cleaning Up Trees and Family Tree Validator
December 16, 2025
Well, this is not how I thought I would be starting my first Genealogy Tip for Steps Back In Time, But then again, life is always throwing us curve balls! Let me step back (no pun intended there, sorry!) to the beginning of December where I decided "who needs to tie your shoelaces when you are only going a few steps?". It turns out I do....I tripped on them and slammed my head into the steel back door. OUCH! I will be okay, and the doctor did tell me to get back to my genealogy work, but slowly to work my brain back up to normal (or at least my normal).
No better way to do that than to take a family tree of mine, of which I have many since I am tracing all sides of my mother and father, and do a clean-up. I took my German family, the Wirtz's, and got to work. I am starting slowly, remember, so I picked the platforms that have my tree that also offers a consistency checker. There are two that have free ones ~ My Heritage and FamilySearch (more on that later) ~ and one that offers it as an add on ~ Ancestry. I don't have the add on for Ancestry, so off to My Heritage first. I ran a consistency report and worked on that to clean it up.
Then off to FamilySearch and a free Chrome extension that I love to use, Family Tree Validator. The developer has come up with a great way to find errors on FamilySearch, make standardized place names, add married last names to the Alternative Name option and a host of other corrections needed. Many of the options are an automatic fix (just click on the Fix Now button and you are done!).
I am still working on the consistency reports (remember, I was told to take it slow), but that is okay because when I am done, I will have cleaned up a few messes I am sure I created long ago. That should help me in my research greatly. Then on to the next step for me, uploading documentation to those trees to back up my work. For those of you interested, Family Tree Validator is available free of charge at https://findmyroots.tech/products/ . His website offers a great tutorial on how to use it also.