What happens when a merge is performed?
I have two different trees, one for myself and one for my wife. There are a few people in both trees. How can I combine the trees into one? Is there something I should do to prepare for the merge? Maybe the answer is to eliminate all duplicate persons except for myself or my wife. Will the merge result in all my wife's family and my family merging into one tree?
Answers
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It sounds like you are not aware that there is only one world tree in FamilySearch. No one has their own tree.
Merging in FamilySearch is done only at the person level, when two person records have been created for the same person. They can be merged and all sources, information and memories from both can be retained in one person record.
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To answer the two different main questions in your post:
1) The goal with Family Tree is to have just one profile for each deceased person who has ever lived. You should merge any deceased people your wife has entered into Family Tree not just with that same person you entered in Family Tree but with every other copy of that person anyone else has entered that you run across.
2) You cannot merge copies of living people in two different accounts. Living people profiles are only viewable by the person who created them. For example, you cannot merge the copy of your wife's Family Tree profile that she sees when signed in with the copy of her that you see when you are signed in.
When you say that you "have two different [small branches of Family Tree]" do you mean that you have created two copies of yourself under your account and two copies of your wife under your same account? One with you and her and your relatives and one with you and her and her relatives? If yes, then you should merge your two copies of her, your two copies of yourself, your duplicates of all living people you have found on both sides of the family, and all the duplicates of every deceased individuals. You do not need to delete anyone, just merge them.
As Gail stated, this merging will not really merge your two families into one tree, because they already are in one and the same tree, just not properly linked together yet, and, it sounds like, not yet properly linked to the main body of Family Tree.
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are you mainly talking about LIVING persons or deceased persons??
For deceased persons - you simply need to add any unlinked relationships.
for living persons that were all created under a single account - you can do the same.
BUT for living persons created under DIFFERERENT login accounts - there are intentional design limitations that prevent linking these people created under different accounts.
LIVING people are only viewable on the account they were created on.
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Okay, I understand the concept of a single tree, but I didn't at the start. Here's what happened. I started with my family "the Washingtons". I got all the ancestors and descendants in there. Then I went on the my wife's family and got all of "the Wilmots" ancestors and descendants in. The problem came up that when I would encounter persons common to both families I did not get a message saying there was already a person of that name in the database and I created a new person. I guess there is a lag in recognizing a person is in there. This happened a number of times and I didn't keep track. So, now i'm tasked with finding them and merging them. I did this to one person and it appeared to break the link in one of the branch of the tree. I think the problem may be that deceased persons that are linked to living persons don't show up. For example my wife and my self are linked to my father separately and there appear to be two records of my deceased father.
I hope this makes sense to someone,
Craig Washington
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How is your wife linked to your father? I can understand about duplicates farther up the tree...but that statement would indicate that your wife shows as your sister as well.
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Like I said. I entered my father twice. Once when I was working on the "Washingtons" and again while adding myself as a spouse (with a father) on the "Wilmots". There was no message indicating that he was already in the database.
BTW, I think at this point I have already resolved all the duplicates.
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Good job that you figured out how to resolve your duplicates!
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