Two pages in GED-VIEW do not show the tree. They show what needs attention in it. Both live under the Research menu.

Issues lists facts that cannot be right, or probably are not. Source coverage lists what is unproven: people and events with nothing behind them.

Neither page changes the data. GED-VIEW reads the file you loaded and produces lists you can pin, hide, export, and take back to RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Ancestry, or wherever the tree lives, to fix there.

Issues

  • Death before birth, or burial before death.
  • A child born when a parent was implausibly young or old.
  • A marriage after one spouse died, or before either was of age.
  • Two people with matching names and dates who might be the same person.
  • People with no path of parent, child or spouse links back to the rest of the tree.
  • Place names that look like the same place spelled differently.

Each item names the people involved and links to their profiles.

Source coverage

  • Unsourced people. Everyone in the file with no citation attached to any fact. A sourced marriage counts as evidence for both spouses.
  • Unsourced events. Births, marriages and deaths with no citation, for people who do have sources elsewhere. This catches the person with a census citation and nothing for their birth.
  • Unused sources. Sources that no citation points to (usually merge residue).
  • Possible duplicate sources. Sources with very similar titles, grouped for review.

What to fix first

Not everything on these pages needs fixing. A rough order:

  1. Anything under Issues that is a real impossibility. Death before birth is a typo, and typos multiply when others copy the tree.
  2. Duplicates. Two entries for one person split the evidence and make every chart wrong.
  3. Unsourced people near the top of the list. Parents and grandparents should have something behind them, and the documents are usually at hand.
  4. The rest, as and when. Unused sources and place variants are cosmetic. Distant unsourced people are a research plan, not a defect.

Working with the lists

Pin the items you are working on so they stay at the top. Hide the ones you have decided are fine (the same-name children where the first died young, the in-law you added on purpose). Export the list if you want it on paper or in a spreadsheet while you work in another program.

Taking it back to your program

Each item shows the GEDCOM ID next to each person (the I-number). Desktop programs use the same IDs, so searching on the ID there is exact, which matters when there are four John Smiths.

Fix the fact in the desktop program, export a new GEDCOM, and open it again. The lists update.

If the tree lives on Ancestry or MyHeritage, the workflow is the same but the edit happens on the website.

Next

Load the file and open Issues. If the list is long, that is normal for a tree that has been through a few imports. It gets shorter faster than expected.