Wrong connection

HeatherNicol

Another member has incorrectly merged her Mary Ann Dillow (GS3Y-SYR) with mine. Hers was born in Texas in 1953 while mine was born in London, England in 1799 and has a son born in 1836. My tree is now showing the wrong Mary Ann Dillow with her parents.

I have asked the other member to unmerge these records but so far this has not been done.

Please advise how I can separate these two Mary Ann Dillow records.

Thank you.

Heather Nicol

CHold

@HeatherNicol

Your question will be forwarded to another specialty team that will be better able to answer your question.

dontiknowyou

@HeatherNicol it looks like you have successfully reversed the bad merge. Next task would be to dig into what triggered the merge.

GS3Y-SYR Mary Ann Dillow born in 1953 is attached to a GS3Y-HDD William Jenner born in 1803. This (a) is not possible and (b) explains the confusion. They have a child GS3R-M49 Henry Jenner born in 1836. Her William and Henry may be duplicates of your Mary Ann Dillow's own William and Henry.

So, how I would resolve this is I would sort out GS3Y-SYR Mary Ann Dillow, taking care to remove any attached sources, parents, spouses, and children that do not belong. Also standardize her event dates and places. Standardizing helps greatly to prevent bad hints and the bad merges that follow working bad hints.

HeatherNicol

Thank you for your reply. However, forgive me if I've got this wrong, if I edit GS3Y-SYR Mary Ann Dillow, this will only result in one record and the other member will lose her record. Is this the only way forward?

Thank you again for your help.

Heather Nicol

Gordon Collett

There are a couple of important issues here.

First off, looking at the Change Log for Mary Ann there were never any merges so there is no merge to reverse.

The Change Log shows that you entered Mary Ann with just her name and no other vital information, her parents with just their names, and her husband and son with fairly complete information.

To your record, the other user directly added a birth date that does not fit the other information you added at all and a new set of parents, turning her into the current mix of two Mary Anns. Why she did this, there is no discernible reason. I would wonder if it came up as a hint. If so, it wasn't a very good one. I would assume that however it came up, the other user was not presented with, or just didn't look at, the family that was already connected to her.

So your have one record for two people and there were never separate records for them.

Now you have two choices for fixing this and making sure it does not happen again:

1. Go to the second set of parents, William Sheridan Dillow and Roxie Mary Villemain.
2. Create a brand new Mary Ann Dillow with the 1953 birth information.
3. Move the Texas birth source to this new Mary Ann Dillow
4. Remove your Mary Ann from that family.
5. Delete the birth information from your Mary Ann

Or:

1. Use the edit relationship icon to replace the current Mary Ann Dillow as being the wife of William Jenner and the mother of Henry Jenner.
2. During the Replace process, create a brand new Mary Ann Dillow of your own.
3. Move the source you currently have on Mary Ann for her marriage to this new Mary Ann.
4. Add your new Mary Ann Dillow as a child to William Dillow and Mary.
5. Remove the old Mary Ann from being a child of William Dillow and Mary.

Either will be about the same amount of work.

However, I would strongly suggest you take the second option! Why? Having been born in 1953, the other user may well have attached living people to her that you cannot see and that you cannot move. Leaving them attached to your Mary Ann is asking for all sorts of problems. In fact, since this other user has demonstrated she is not being very careful, for all you know this Mary Ann born in 1953 is still be alive and any day someone will notice this and request she be marked living, which would really goof up your family.

If you are not familiar with the use of the Edit Relationship function, you use the little paper and pencil icons to get into it. It's a bit confusing, but just take a good look at the screens, reading carefully, and I'm sure it will go fine. I think it would work best to first replace Mary Ann as a wife then move Henry to his proper parents using the icon next to his name where you see him as a child.

To do this, you must start on William Jenner's page:

(This may not concern you at all, but for others who might read this, I'll mention that no ordinances are reserved or completed for any of the individuals involved here so shifting around relationships like this is perfectly fine to do.)

dontiknowyou

First off, looking at the Change Log for Mary Ann there were never any merges so there is no merge to reverse.

Just for the record, no sign of a prior merge does not mean there never was one.

Gordon Collett

All merges that have occurred in Family Tree since the Change Log was fully functional without any bugs will be recorded. Since Mary Ann's record was created in 2019, this is certainly the case for her.

Also, the Change Log clearly shows that when the incorrect birth date was added in Dec 2021, probably through attaching an incorrect source since the information added is formatted exactly as it is in the source, there is no sign of a merge:

What will not show up in the Change Log are merges and combinations that took place before Family Tree existed, that is, prior to the spring of 2012 in the New Family Search database.

I suspect that the course of events here was that a hint showed up on the parents of the Mary Ann born in 1953 and when adding that hint, Mary Ann popped up in the Source Linker as a possible match for the child in the source hint since Mary Ann had no birth information and parents with similar names and was accepted at face value and added to the family.