Family Tree not populating
Hello,
I have a question about why my client's tree didn't populate after adding deceased great grand parents. I'm helping a client populate her tree. She is entered, and her parents, and grandparents who are deceased are entered. Her sister has also entered the grand parents and great grandparents.
But we have had to search for the deceased grandparents's parents and children, who are already on the tree. Her sister has entered deceased grandparents, deceased great grandparents and their families.
But when we go from her and enter her living parents, then deceased grandparents it doesn't populate to the next generations. Her living sister is connected to her and then they both entered living parents, then they both entered deceased grandparents.
But we had to enter the deceased grandparents and deceased great grandparents seperately, by searching Family Tree. When we got to the deceased great great grand parents the tree began populating.
My client is from Mexico and the family is from Mexico and the source records are from Mexico.
A friend of mine told me that Mexico has probably put limitations on what can be done in Family Tree if the sources are from Mexico.
I'm befuddled.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Anitra Whittle
Answers
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I find this quite confusing.
Firstly I would very much doubt there would be any limitations on the adding of Family Tree profiles for Mexican relatives, though there may be limited access to some of the relevant source records, as for many record collections.
Moving on to the main question, you say 'Her sister has also entered the grand parents and great grandparents'. If the family has added and/or successfully (and verifiably) searched for 2 or more profiles for a single deceased person, you will need to merge them, at which point you will hopefully find that any Family Tree couple or parent/child relationships that were already in place will be visible correctly to everyone. You can then put any missing relationships in place.
I hope this makes sense. If it doesn't help, please provide Family Tree PIDs (deceased relatives only) so that the community can help you research this further.
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So, question about how you entered the deceased grandparents. Did you search the tree for them, copy their PIDs and then add them to her living parents by PID? Or did you make duplicate person pages of the grandparents. If you made duplicates, that would explain why nothing is populating. See @MandyShaw1 's comment about merging.
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To be honest, the "Find" mechanism is not very powerful. Often, it cannot find profiles UNTIL we create a duplicate and connect it to the tree.
1 -
@Anitra Whittle - I'm going to make a bit of a stab at what I think is going on and what I suspect you may be thinking is going on... I could be very wrong. (By the way, forgive me for using English names for the examples...)
Firstly, there is no automatic population of any "tree" in FamilySearch FamilyTree. With any luck you (or your client) can connect to people who are already in FS FT, and can see the generations further back, but the initial connection always has to be done manually - sometimes with help from the software, sometimes not.
So let's say we're at the stage where someone has entered their deceased grandparents John Smith (1890-1970) and Mary Jones (1895-1965). Somebody might have told you that those two are already in FS FT but the problem is that the John Smith (1890-1970) who's just been entered might look like one or more John Smiths with those dates who are already in the tree. How can the computer decide which of them is "your" John Smith? It can't - it relies on you (or your client) to look at the fine detail and say "That one's not him because he lives in the wrong part of the country. And that's one's not him because I know my John's father's name - even though I've not put it in yet - and this guy has the wrong father's name. But this one is him - even though he's missing a death date - because he's born in this tiny village just like my John, he's got the right father, etc, etc."
Apologies if any of this is obvious but I'm trying to get over that automatic connection is downright impossible.
What you, or your client, have to do is decide for yourselves that this John Smith on this profile (profile is just another name for what people call a record in some other systems) over here represents the same John Smith that you've just entered on the new profile. You then have to merge the two profiles so you just have one. Then, if the John Smith who was already in the system, had parents, grandparents, etc, then and only then will you see that your client's "tree" goes back using the links that were already in the system.
There are several ways of going about all this - sometimes the system will actually suggest to you that John Smith ABCD-XYZ is the same person as John Smith SPQR-DEF. You absolutely need to carefully check such a suggestion because the computer can be wrong. If you agree with the suggestion then you can accept it and go on to merge the 2 profiles so you only have the one profile for John.
Sometimes the computer won't suggest that the two profiles are the same - if you are totally convinced that they are the same, then you can merge them by specifying the profile ids.
As is suggested above, sometimes when you come to the point of creating a profile for the deceased grandparent or great-grandparent or whatever, then the system will effectively say, "Do you want to see if they are already in the system?" and you can choose from a list of possibilities, rather than creating a new profile and merging later on.
There's always several ways of doing anything.
But the key to answering your question is that there is no automatic population - you have to make the connection to an existing deceased person's profile yourself and then the next generations will appear in the tree that you see, because they're already there, input by someone else. On the other hand - there might not be anyone else already in FSFT for that family.
7 -
Good answers to a relatively vague question. 😊
So, when I enter the deceased relative for my client, with the xxxx-xxx number and details my client got from her sister who has a populate tree on her account, and we put the coarrect xxxx-xxx and details in then;
The box comes up indicating "is this the one" or "is this a match", and we said yes it is a match, then the computer program just attached that person and does not offer any other relatives.
But on my client's tree that person is connected to a expanded tree with many generations.
I haven't had this happen before.
I had to go and enter each and every great great grandparent with PID from her sister, even though the original person is exactly the same as her sister's dead relative. Finally FamilySearch offered a person and my client said yes and it finally populated.
I'm thinking now that perhaps it was just a busy day for the algorithms.
Thank you one and all for your comments.
My client did get her tree populated after we went to the gggrandparents.
Thank you all,
Anitra
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