How do I delete someone from my tree?

Wade Olson

Someone has attached a problematic source to a member of my family and it's changed their name. I tried detaching the source but the name didn't go back to his real name. I feel my only choice is to disassociate the messed up name and create a new record for my family member. And is there a way to keep people from re-attaching that source and screwing up my family member again?

Charity976

Names are not automatically changed by attaching a source. You are able to detach the source and manually change the name back. I am not aware of a way to prevent people from attaching a source, but you should not have to worry about the name changing automatically.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Yeah, as Charity says, neither attaching nor detaching a source changes the name on a profile. The only thing that changes the name on a profile is, well, changing the name on the profile.

You don't need to -- and should not -- create a new profile because of this. What you can and should do is to go to the profile's Change Log (Details page - Latest Changes - See All) and restore the previous (i.e. correct) name. You'll just need to think sort of upside-down, because the log doesn't have an "undo" function: instead, you need to find where the previous name was originally entered and click "restore" next to that. If the profile was created a decade ago, then that original entry may be at the very bottom of the change log.

Gordon Collett

If there are particular items that have been changed on a person that you want to review and/or reverse, there are two ways to handle a long Change Log.

One is to open that particular item such as the name and look at changes just for it:

That makes it easy to see the entire history of that one item and, as you can see, you can pick which of the various past versions of the data you want to restore it to. That is why there is no simple "undo." There may have been several changes that messed up your data and it may be that just undoing the most recent change is not actually what you want to do.

Or, you can go to the complete change log, click on the Filter button, choose the one item you want, and get to the same filtered viewed:

The filters here make if very efficient to check several items one at a time by, for example, clicking name, then birth, then death. Frequently I will make use of the Merge button that is further down the list to see all the merges on the person at the same time.

That is a really handy feature.

Paul W

A name can be easily changed during the merge process, but it is just as easy to edit it (so it reads as before) by reversing the way it appears at the top of the Details page. I find myself having to do this if the same individual has been merged using, say, their married name, or that of a second spouse. Also, there can be genuine differences of opinion in whether the name should appear as the individual's birth name or the name they were known as for most of their life. The latter issue can possibly lead to an "edit war" (whereby the other user will alter the name as soon as you change it back to your preference), but there is little you can do avoid another user from changing the names or your relatives.