Child has father listed twice.

missm19

I have a person whose father is listed twice (ids are the same), but the mother is only listed once. When I click on add mother and then add by id, I put her id in. It then pulls the mother up and says, relationship already exists. How do I get it to just show one father?

NidaFL

@missm19 When you see the same parent ( with same ID number) twice , but the other parent only once, it is usually because the child is linked to on parent twice, but only once to the other parent. Where you see the option to add spouse, look before that "square" for children, There may be a child "hiding' down there that needs to be acted upon. You may find the solution in the Help Center using search term, Duplicate relationship, or use this link My ancestor in Family Tree is connected to the same parent twice

jlwestra

Hello missm19, You can delete the relationship of the child to the father who is listed without a spouse. To do that, click on the little pencil to the right of that partial relationship. Then on the next screen, click way at the bottom, on delete relationship. For a reason, you can say something like: Duplicate relationship, child to father.

missm19

Thank you so much! I looked because I was sure it is a common occurrence, but I must have not been using the correct keywords. Thank you for your help. I got it fixed.

Gordon Collett

Due to some of the features of Family Tree and some of the underlying data structure, and depending on how the relationships you describe arose, it is generally best for the health of the database to never delete a relationship unless it is flat out wrong. If at all possible, you should instead merge relationships even though it is a couple of extra steps.

Here is how you do this. (Examples were generated in Beta.)

1) Starting the situation you describe:

2) Add a temporary second mother:

3) Merge the two mothers.

I will admit this is not always necessary but it is always safest.

(For those wanting more information, I'll mention that depending on the specific record, just deleting the extra relationship is one of the quickest ways to generate the blue warning box on the ordinance page, particularly if when you go to the father's detail page you see a second wife for him whose name is just a question mark.)