how to merge trees

Pamela7128

Hi I found another tree that has an extensive lineage of a person in my tree but I can't figure out how to merge them. I had added some details to the person in my tree hoping it would trigger a merge/match but that didn't work.

I also cannot figure out how to use the source linker. The demo said a pencil image should show up but I don't see anything.

Wayland K Adams

Hi Pamela - Welcome to FamilySearch Community and asking your question about merging. Family Search tries to identify possible duplicates and highlighting those to the users. However, there are cases where possible duplicates are not identified by FamilySearch. The alternative is do a merge by ID. Here is a link to the instructions for doing a merge by ID.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-merge-duplicates-in-family-tree-by-id

Relative to the source linker, here is a link to some instructions. You can find more by going to the help and learning section and searching for source linker. Use the circle with the ? inside at the upper right to get to the help and learning section.

https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-merge-duplicates-in-family-tree-by-id

Áine Ní Donnghaile

@Pamela7128 To see the pencil (edit) icon, you need to be on the Details page of an individual profile. There, you will see a pencil by any field that can be changed.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

First, a clarification: there are no such things as "another tree" and "my tree" in the collaborative shared Family Tree on FamilySearch. No profile for a public (deceased) person "belongs" to any one user or even group of users: we all have exactly the same edit rights for them.

Wayland gave the link to the Help Center article on merging by ID. I find it useful even when the hinting system does find a possible duplicate; it allows me to do merges in the order I want, without danger of misreading/misremembering the random alphanumeric strings (i.e. PIDs) that are often the only difference visible in the Research Helps box. (I do a lot of cleanup of legacy data, which is full of index-based exact duplicates.)

It does occur to me that perhaps what you've encountered is not actually part of the shared tree, but a static genealogy file that someone has uploaded to FamilySearch's Genealogies section. These are a completely different beast, but some parts and presentations of the two are very similar, so it's easy to get confused.

Both include a hyphenated seven-character alphanumeric string in the profile identifier, the sections use exactly the same landscape tree graphics, and both display a profile summary in a side panel. They are, however, not at all the same. The Genealogies section is essentially a publicly-searchable and -viewable cloud backup service for genealogy files. Said files are static: nobody can edit them in any way, not even the users who uploaded them. (The user who uploaded a particular file can delete it and upload a different one, but the new file will have different identifiers assigned to it.)

If the lineage that you found is in such a static upload, then you can't incorporate it into the shared Tree by merging. You'll need to copy any new information over manually.

Pamela7128

Thanks, the first response that I got was all that I needed. And I was able to merge the files so that the extended lineage shows up now when I search for my known ancestor.