Question about merging
I just went to a great aunt's person page. I haven't worked on it for a couple of years, and when I navigated to her from my pedigree view, a message appeared saying that this person was deleted, and then the page went blank. I started over and repeated my same actions, but this time I quickly clicked her husband before the page could go blank. From there I was able to click to her new person page. It seems a couple of merges took place. I looked through the history log and they were perfectly in order. Everything I remember adding to her was retained, so I have no beef with the merges.
My beef is why the tree didn't know to display the correct, current PID. Why did it go to the deleted PID instead of the current one? And why did the page simply go blank? I can see that many people would be confused and angry and think their whole branch had been deleted.
Answers
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Hi Gail - Thanks for contacting FamilySearch Community about merged records and PIDs. Unfortunately, you didn't provide the PIDs you are trying to look at so we can't replicate the problem and get it turned in for a fix. There are a couple of things you can try. Open family search with a different browser and see if you have the same problem. Also, you may want to clear your browser cookies and history.
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I know it went away so you can't easily check, but was it the merge-specific "This person was deleted by merge" message?
Or was it the more general "This person does not exist, has been removed, or is restricted" one?
Either way, I'm wondering if it's a case of an incompletely-loaded page (due to a connectivity glitch) that your browser is "helpfully" serving up instead of loading the page anew. The reason I think this is a possibility is that FS's webpages are built up in what I think of as layers: first it loads the basic framework with the navigation and such that's the same regardless of the specifics, then a "fallback" page that will show if nothing gets loaded on top of it, then, after it has checked for permission and stuff, it loads the actual content. If things got glitchy right around the start of loading the content, then you'd briefly see the fallback -- which is usually some type of error message -- and then the beginning of the content: a blank page for it to go on. (That's my basic understanding of it, anyway; it's probably greatly oversimplified.)
In any case, there's a relatively easy way to check if it's the browser's fault: try it in a different browser.
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Hi Gail,
a long time, I remember Ron Tanner saying something about "sometimes FamilySearch takes a long time to "re-calculate" the Ordinance information during a merge". This might apply in your case.
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Julia Szent-Györgyi and Wayland K Adams You are right about my memory. I do not think it matched either of Julia's two images, but who knows. I think it just said Person was Deleted or perhaps Deleted Person. It remained visible for possibly 1 second, which is plenty of time - when forewarned - to click someone else on the person page in order to hold the family group in view. After I clicked the husband and then clicked the [new] wife that was shown (PID GH7V-6W3, by the way), the disappearing act never repeated itself, so I really am not sure it is a browser thing, unless the glitch is a browser related glitch itself. My browser of choice for FamilySearch is not going to change at this point unless everything disappears and stays gone.
My access to Aunt Myrl right now is fine and I have no reason to think it will go tilt again. I did remember one action I did with her original person page that was undone by the merges, I had assigned one of the memories to her profile photo. That was easily redone. In looking at the log I think there was only 1 merge of her person pages since 2020, but I think her parents were possibly duplicated as well and that got fixed at the same time, looks like. I believe all is good at the moment and no cleanup or restoring is needed.
Getting back to my question, many people would have been disturbed at the "disappearing act" behavior. What is the expected behavior when a person somehow brings up a PID that has been deleted? Perhaps that's what I should have asked in the first place.
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In most actions, when you select a deleted person you get the same action as bringing up an active record. You get the summary card, select the person to go to the deleted person page. Here you can review the change log and restore the record if appropriate. Not sure about the scenario yourdescribe since that is not a normal thing. It is too bad we can recreate the issue.
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It's actually pretty hard to bring up a merge-deleted profile, and it certainly shouldn't be possible from any chart view: those should just show (and go to) the merge survivor.
If you were the one who did the merge, then the action will be in your "My Contributions" list, but the "Person Deleted" label in that appears directly above the corresponding survivor and "Person Merged", so it's unlikely to cause anxiety.
The part that makes me doubt that what you saw was the merge-deleted message is that those don't have any relationships: the husband would not have been on that page for you to click before it went blank. I'm pretty sure that what you saw was a fallback/background page in the loading process, i.e., something that doesn't show when things are going smoothly. You can only see that page if your system is very, very slow, or there's a glitch that slowed or stopped it.
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Well, maybe it was just a fluke and won't happen again. It is the spooky time of year, after all.
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