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Merging families not just induvials!

PaulHarrison61
PaulHarrison61 ✭
February 5 edited February 17 in Suggest an Idea

Please also review the merging of records process. Its a great Idea but should be done at immediately family level {i.e. father, mother and children off} and not at the individual person level.

Currently if you merge say the mother record an new husband is created with new person per child! The poor user then has to merge all these records! Displaying the consequences of the merge would also be desirable

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Active · Last Updated February 5

Comments

  • Julia Szent-Györgyi
    Julia Szent-Györgyi ✭✭✭✭✭
    February 5

    No, merging does not create a new husband. That husband was already there, created at the same time as the duplicate wife. You need to merge both people to finish the cleanup.

    I agree that it would be far less tedious to clean up index-based duplicated families if one could do it by couple rather than individually, but your misunderstanding of what's going on illustrates one of the reasons it would probably not be a good idea.

    4
  • PaulHarrison61
    PaulHarrison61 ✭
    February 9 edited February 9

    Its perspective. Not an absolute new husband but a new one for the merged wife. These ideas are for the developers

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  • Gordon Collett
    Gordon Collett ✭✭✭✭✭
    February 9 edited February 9

    Any changes to merging need to make the process slower and more difficult, not easier. It is among the riskiest, most fraught with potential damage, procedures of anything we can do in Family Tree. It definitely must remain as one individual at a time to be able to clearly see step by step what one is doing. That is why the engineers have through time tried to build in error controls such as the current three screen process and the flags for differences in years.

    My record for merges for one family was one in which each of the dozen children in the family had been indexed three times and most of the family had been submitted by patrons two or three times back in the 1950 and 1960. This required about 120 merges just for that one family. It took a couple of days but being required to do the merges one step at a time kept things organized and and accurate.

    I do hope the engineers continue to improve the process of merging by building in more error checking and blocks to prevent incorrect merges. But I don't think being able to merge more than one person at a time should ever be part of that.

    Speed and convenience are the enemy of accuracy and logical evaluation of information.

    I've seen Julia's posts about her work in the indexed Hungarian birth records and clearly she has done thousands of merges and understands the system very well. She did not disagree with you, although I do, but just pointed out the importance of clear language is discussing processes. The merged wife does not get a new husband in any sense or perspective. The two duplicate women who have now been merged are just still connected to the original two duplicate husbands which still require merging. This requires one to now go through the complete information for those husband three times in the process of merging them so that if any errors in the merge are revealed one can stop and go back to the women and unmerge them before making any more of a mess.

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  • davidnewton2
    davidnewton2 ✭✭✭
    February 11 edited February 17

    I very much agree merging is something to be done carefully. There are significant problems with the database schema here. However the progress is often in the right direction. For example the change to all source citations being taggable to all single person events and facts was a massive step in the right direction.

    My biggest issues with the database schema now?

    1. The artificial distinction still maintained for birth, christening et al as compared to other events where they have no description field.

    2. The very limited options for couple events which miss out genealogically very significant things such as marriage banns.

    3. The failure to separate out the street address of an event into its own place details field. This ties into cemeteries and churches and stately homes finding their way into the places database which is a most unwise bloating of the size and purpose of that already gigantic in scope snd size database.

    1
  • Maile L
    Maile L mod
    February 17

    Hey guys. Just a heads up that this thread has been edited and closed due to code of conduct violations.

    0
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