Why is family search adding ? markes for either a husband or a wife?
Answers
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Can you post the PID or a screen shot to better understand the issue?
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It is not a good idea to delete these ?s. They are a placeholder created when records in past systems that did not have both parents were imported into Family Tree. The import process did not allow a blank parent spot.
These can come in three forms:
Child with parents Father and ?
Child with two sets of parents, one set being just Father the other being just ?
Child with just Father and no mother, and Father married to ? without children.
These various child to parents relationships can often have underlying data in Family Tree such that just removing the ? leads to problems.
(For church members, I will state that the primary problem with deleting the ? is that this is the quickest way to get that blue box warning on the ordinance page that states the child is sealed to parents to whom the child is no longer linked in Family Tree)
Since the family has other issues, it will be particularly important to maintain the question marks as landmarks to undo the other problems in the family.
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"On 27 June 2016, our systems added a question mark to the name field of any person whose first and last names were blank. You can change a question mark to the correct name if you know it. Otherwise, leave it as a placeholder until you discover the correct name."
"Think twice before you delete"
"Be careful about deleting any relationships where one person is related to another person whose name is represented by a question mark. The question mark could be the result of a merge or some other action that, for now, has removed the name. In time, you or another patron may be able to supply the missing information."
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In this case the husband LZF3-WMP Peter Kennaway has 3 wives: LZF3-486 Marione Douglas with 8 children between them, and two "?" wives with no information whatsoever and no clues in their change logs. Peter Kennaway, his named wife and children all have historical records attached. He has 17 historical records. So, I would simply merge the two placeholders into LZF3-486.
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