what does "attach" mean? I want to merge two records & only keep one of them.

JudyCosler

I find multiple entries for the same person. Some have FS PIDs; some do not.

What does "attach" mean? I want to keep one record which has more information. How do I do this & delete or merge the other records?

Gail Swihart Watson

Well, maybe I am guilty of not understanding what you meant. When you said record, I immediately thought marriage record [as an example]. But maybe you meant person record? If 2 duplicate people have been created? yes, they can and should be merged. Can you provide the PID you have so I can see what is going on?

By the way, by collection, I meant something like "Virginia, Fauquier County, Marriage registers, 1798-1902" . A collection of images.

Gordon Collett

To start with the fundamentals:

The FamilySearch website is made up of several major divisions, some of which are completely independent and some which are interlinked. Two of these are:

• The Historical Record Collections - This section contains historical sources of information, some of which have been indexed so they can be searched. The names of peoples in these sources do not have FS PIDs.
• FamilyTree - This section is the wiki tree where we work together establish the world's genealogy. All person profiles have a FS PID as a unique identifier. This is a random number generated when a profile is first created.

To accomplish the work in Family Tree to have one profile for each person that has lived on the earth that is well documented with sources, two of the processes we can use in Family Tree are:

• Attach - this is the process of attaching a source record to a Family Tree profile.
• Merge - this is the process of merging two Family Tree profiles that represent one person into one profile.

You cannot merge sources or add or subtract information from them. The sources are used to add support for the information in a person's Family Tree profile. Every source you can find for a person should be added to that profile's source page.

However, when you merge profiles, you can, and should, combine all the information in both profiles to make the final, single profile as complete and correct as possible.

You can see the difference between attaching and merging in the Research Helps section. If there is a source that might be for the person that the programming has found for you, there will be a blue Hint icon that when clicked on will start the process for attaching the source. If there are possible duplicate profiles, these will be listed with a red icon and clicking there will start the process for merging.

Gail Swihart Watson

Both of these profiles were created by FamilySearch. I have no idea why they were created twice: 27YH-HXJ and MBWC-4LT.

It sure looks to me like they should be merged. Same parents, except parents are dups too.

Gail Swihart Watson

Make sure they are really different records. Someone may have 15 marriage records, but if they have 14 children who lived to adulthood and married, each record could be for a different child's marriage. Since sources are from different collections, they are not the kind of thing you can merge. If one source is truly a duplicate of another, ie both from the same collection, then just remove one of them.

JudyCosler

I don't understand your answer @Gail Swihart Watson .

If one record has a PID and another record does not have a PID (how is this even possible???) ---- ?

If 2 records have different PIDs, then what?

what do you mean by "collection?"

JudyCosler

@Gail Swihart Watson yes, I meant a person (person record, I guess).

here is one: 1875-Deceased • 27YH-HXJ (first name spelled DAISEY)

there is one with no PID (how is this possible??). Same parents, same birth info. this one doesn't come up now; maybe I got rid of it???

here is another: MBWC-4LT (first name spelled DAISY); otherwise same info.

Gordon Collett

Both of these profiles were created by FamilySearch. I have no idea why they were created twice: 27YH-HXJ and MBWC-4LT.

Both of these profiles were part of the original construction of Family Tree. You can tell this because both have a creation date in the spring of 2012.

Family Tree was created from several different previous FamilySearch databases of genealogical information including the International Genealogical Index, the Ancestral File, the Pedigree Resource File, various extraction record databases, and various user submitted trees. Looking at these two records, I would guess one was from the IGI and the other from either the AF or the PRF.

Because these older databases had a lot of duplicates, we have a lot of duplicates to still clean up in Family Tree.

As a simple example, in the IGI, each database entry had just one event. This meant that for, say, "John Smith," the IGI would have a record for him as a child in his birth record, him as the husband in a marriage record, and him as the father in the birth records for each of his ten children, and him as the father of the bride or groom in each of his children's marriage records. So John may have ended up with 22 duplicates in Family Tree. It is up to us to find and merge all these records.

My current record for merges which were needed for a family with 12 children who had IGI records, multiple extraction records, and family trees created in old systems by a couple of different people, is about 120 merges. It took a couple of days to get the family completely tidied up.

JudyCosler

@Gail Swihart Watson the father had 2 dupes. I merged them all. may have him married to same person twice. He has 2 more children now.

Gave up before I merged the mothers.

not even my relatives! found her name of back of picture containing my grandmother.

thanks for your help. over & out.