Deleting or Disconnecting Individuals in a Family Group

Christianna

My intent was to create a group for my parents and their descendants to share memories that include living people, to share ordinances with nieces and nephews, and to keep track of births and weddings of descendants. When adding my husband to the group, it also added his family tree including his parents and ancestors. Can I add a spouse or in-law without including their family tree? Or can I delete a spouse or in-law if there is a divorce? It's not a current problem but it doesn't fit the purpose of my group.

Gordon Collett

Keep in mind that your Family Group is not separated from the main Family Tree database. It is only an isolated section of that database which contains only living people and which can only be viewed by people in your group. All deceased people are still in the main tree and visible to all users.

Also, when you copy a living person's profile from your personal set of living people into the group, you are creating a copy of that profile. Any changes to that profile will not affect the original copy in your private space.

Assuming your husband is alive, then, yes, you can safely just delete the relationship between him and his parents. If his parents are alive, you can also safely delete their group profiles from the group. These changes will just occur in the group. However, if your husband is deceased, then you should not remove him from his parents because that will remove him from his parents in the main database for all of his relatives.

To illustrate:

(That Delete with an arrow in the upper example is point at the relationship only, not a person.)

Do keep in mind that if you do this, then any descendants of you and your husband who want Ordinances Ready to give them ordinances for his part of the family will either need to have their own duplicate living profiles to connect them to that half of the family or may need to restore the relationship between your husband and his parents (which any group member can do at any time) to get those. I'm not really sure how the program works if a grandchild has only his or her own profile in the tree and is connected to parents and grandparents only through a family group.

AnneLoForteWillson

@Christianna, Gordon Collett gave a very good explanation of how the family group trees connect with the deceased individuals in the FamilySearch Tree. Does this help you to define the context of your family group? Did this answer your question?

JanettACall1

I am trying to start a new Family Group-- having a rough time of it!
I went into the Group Tree and saw names that are not on my list anywhere. I realized that the names I can see are names I have added to the FamilySearch Family Tree. (by looking at my contributions) I am working on BYU RecordLinkingLabs adding Sources to the records and adding lots of new persons, family members that are located in Census and All kinds of new sources.
I had NO IDEA that these persons were being added to my Family Group Tree! What do I do now??