I am having an issue with someone unmerging entire families that are obvious duplicates
I have come across several profiles where there are obvious duplicates for each member of the family. Yet, every time I carefully merge the profiles someone comes along and unmerges them. The most recent family I have seen this with is Christopher Curwen 96NJ-VP8 and his wife Margaret Bellingham 2Z3J-ZCR. If you look at the change history you will see that the same person keeps unmerging the profiles of the parents and children etc. Today, they were doing it right after I did the merging. So I would re-merge and they would un-merge and we were going in circles until I gave up. What can be done in this situation?
I have seen it with at least one other family I have worked on-there are two different profiles for Thomas Preston LVJB-J1K and L5BK-HTN. Also, two different profiles for his wife Margaret Fytche LZ8L-CRZ and L5BK-DFH. Fortunately, their children have stayed merged but now each child has two sets of parents.
Any insight, course of action etc? Thanks :)
Answers
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Have you tried sending a message to that person? In the change history click on their username and click on Message. Ask them why they think the two should not be merged—perhaps they have a good reason or there is some other misunderstanding. Better communication when merging or unmerging also might help—both of you should put a clear reason in the comment (more than the standard boilerplate).
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Have you been adding evidence (sources) to your profiles and as @JohnFaucett says you should put a clear reason in the comment.
You can also put an alert note,especially if you have evidence and have added the said evidence to the profile.
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Even adding an Alert Note doesn't slow down those who are just changing without paying attention. See my comment in this recent thread. https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/508082/#Comment_508082
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Yes, for the first family I was having the issue with I did contact the person doing the unmerging. I had also attached four different sources.
ME-Hello- Just wanted to get some clarity as to why you reversed the hours of work I did yesterday on the Preston/Fytche families. Please let me know if there is something I am not understanding about this family. Thank you.
THEM-simply putting back all the years of hard work that was deleted.
THEM-why are you deleting my work ?
ME-I was not deleting-I was merging the profiles of two couples when evidence shows they are the same people. Same children, parents, etc.
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Yes, there are supporting sources attached by either myself or others for both of these families. For Christopher Curwen and his family there is even a source attached by the person doing the unmerging that shows that the profiles are the same people.
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Trying merging your duplicate into the record they keep restoring. Perhaps they are using a 3rd party software system that is showing them that their PIDs are no longer the same? So they are restoring to get the same PIDs. Try that and see if they leave it alone.
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Hmm.
Maybe the other person doesn't understand that their work isn't lost, it's become part of the merged profile? (If they go in on the ID of "their" profile, it says "Deleted Person", which is a bit frightening until you realise that the info is there on the Surviving Person). Indeed, do they understand that merging is what FS FamilyTree is about?
Maybe (more worrying) they really, really, need to see their name against the updates.
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@Amy Archibald - thanks:) I will try this and see if it makes a difference.
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@Amy Archibald I'm pretty much ready to give up and just stay away from any profiles worked on by them as they both just go in and reverse any work myself or others have done-no matter how well researched, sources provided etc.
It's now happening again with another family I worked on yesterday-Albert Grelley II LVD6-53Q and his family. It's just a waste of my time to work on profiles only the come back the next day and everything is methodically reversed, detached, etc.
It's also frustrating that there is not a way to request help from FamilySearch in these situations. In the past I tried to report it as abuse because that was the only option available (but explained what was actually happening) but was sent an email saying it didn't qualify as abuse.
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