Identical individuals cannot be merged
Sgt. Thomas Hill Michael, 3 June 1917 – 19 September 1944, • MHR1-3N2 and
Thomas Hill Michael, 3 June 1917 – 19 September 1944 • G88R-BJQ
Cannot be merged - reason is A parent cannot be merged with his or her child, although there does not seem to be or to have been an instance where these two could be construed to be parent and child.
I have checked all the changes to both, removed MHR1-3N2 from all relationships to see if they can be merged.
I added G88R-BJQ to the parent, so they show as brothers.
Merge is still not possible.
Best Answer
-
When two people can't be merged for this seemingly inexplicable reason, it is almost certainly because of relationships to living persons that you can't see. Suppose that some user created a living person record for a woman and set her as the wife of Sgt. Thomas Hill Michael • MHR1-3N2 and also set that same living person as the mother of Thomas Hill Michael • G88R-BJQ. From the perspective of that living person, the one Thomas is a son and the other is a husband, and thus one is the son of the other and of course they can't be merged.
This would all make perfect sense if the participants in the relationships were deceased and visible to us. But we can't see these relationships to the living. We can't even see in the change logs that these relationships were added. So it seems to be a great mystery. But if this is the case, then there is no bug and Family Tree is doing exactly what it needs to do -- preventing a merge between parent and child.
However, the change logs do show that the same user marked both of these people as deceased. There's no guarantee that that is the user with the living relationships that are preventing the merge, but it could very well be the case. So @CarolynHinze1 could contact that user and ask if those relationships to a living person exist. If so, that user certainly made an inadvertent mistake and would hopefully delete the erroneous relationship. Then the merge could be done.
1
Answers
-
There's another thread about a similarly-inexplicable occurrence of that error message: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/498802
I have not been able to figure out what's going on. At this point I'm fairly certain this is some sort of bug.
1 -
We appreciate you bringing this problem to our attention. The issue has been submitted for investigation. We will get back to you as soon as we have an answer. Thank you so much for your kindness and patience while this is being addressed.
0
