How do curators find so many duplicated profiles?

Private User - what a great question.

I'm sure Randy will have some suggestions. In the past, we had projects like the Krakow Families project that people helped on.

You are correct that we sometimes can't keep up with all the data and tree conflicts to resolve and merges.

We have a great user discussion group around Colonial American profiles and families. And several around rabbinical families. We might start one for families from all or perhaps several discussion groups around families from specific regions. For example, I work mainly on families from (1) Suwalki Gubernia, (2) Lomza Gubernia, (3) Trakai Gubernia, and (4) Volhynia Gubernia. My husband's family were from (5) Zhitomir Gubernia, (6) Kherson Gubernia, and (7) Telshi Gubernia so I do some work there. And my great grandparents' fellow Muscatine Jewish community neighbors were from (8) Shavli Gubernia so again I work on a lot of families from towns in Shavli and nearby Telshi.

Randy works primarily in Central European Jewish communities. Others work in other specific communities.

So we could for example ask people to work on potential merges (duplicates) found in the Jewish tree.

What happens of course is that some of the merges should be rejected and that's why it's good to have a discussion thread because people learn as they discuss how to figure out which merges make sense.

I just had to untangle two NYC families, each of which had a Samuel Abramowitz born around 1899, married to an Esther. One had two daughters, the other had one daughter. Someone, likely me, had merged them in the past. Everyone, even curators, can make a mistake. It's great to have several pairs of eyes on a proposed merge.

I find duplicates by seeing the blue circles pop up in Tree View as I am building a new branch or using SmartCopy to bring over work from MyHeritage or Ancestry. I often build a family in Ancestry, where there are documents and then use SmartCopy to bring over the novel parts of the tree.