Is it possible to undo a whole day's work?
Hello - the other day I made quite a few changes and then discovered a number of other people with the same names and dates. I don't know if they are all duplicates or multiple people with the same fairly common names - but I want to err on the side of caution.
I'm worried that going back piece by piece will make things worse, or I might miss undoing some of the changes I made. Is it possible to undo everything I did that day?
I think I need to step back and make sure I'm dealing with the right people!
thanks for
Answers
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Hi Allison - I am sorry, but I don't know of a way to do what you are asking. I have been down that rat hole a few times myself and have had to work backwards to undo many of the changes. But with the aid of the change logs, it is possible to at least find the changes you made person by person and correct as necessary. Sorry I don't have a better answer.
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You can work through your Contributions list to see each profile you worked on. Then, on each profile, the details will be in the individual change log.
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Be vigilant when you add sources and make changes that they fit well with extended family, living locations (even home addresses in big towns), vocations, etc.
You would be surprised at the number of folks with the same 2 or even 3 name combination.
Keep a sharp eye out for your folks that have sources with dueling locations on the same census year - even with 'matching' families in tow. Key indicator that you may have two families merged together.
Manually disentangling these comingled families and sources is the needful thing to do. Even if you have the 'Restore Person' option - it will not restore or bring over sources added after the prior merge.
Here's a sample of one thing I like to do. I add occupation (in caps) and home address (in parentheses) to the Description of Residence field so it shows up on the events → details page. This can commonly be found on census records, ww1 & 2 draft registrations, birth and death records, and others.
*P.S.: why SourceLinker did not auto link the source to the Residence is an unknown. 1930 & 1940 were linked to the person back in 2015, 1950 census in 2023. I'm not too worried about this minor detail as the sources are still showing linked to all in the family proper in the Sources tab. This can also happen if you create the Event by manually entering the information i.e.: bringing good info out of Ancestry or a Family Bible in front of you.
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Thanks, that's a great suggestion! Unfortunately, I was working from a family history book for people in 17th and 18th century Germany. This book has the reputation of being well researched from original church records, but the information is basically birth, marriage, death, children. There are one or two records of occupation, but only when they are connected to church records. (One woman is noted in the death record as being a midwife who delivered more than 800 babies! These are the kind of details that make me love genealogy. One man is noted as having been a burgermeister, buuuuttt….. that entry doesn't give the source, so I'm holding off.)
I think what has happened is that multiple people have added the people in the family history book. (It's "Faust-Foust Family in Germany and America" by Howard M. Faust.) Unfortunately, there is a place where there is another woman in the same village, with the same name, and very, very close dates - and everything moving backwards from there ends up quite confused.
I think I will eventually need to merge and clarify, but I will need to keep very close track of the Family Search Code numbers, the dates, the code numbers from this amazing family history book etc. I guess today will be all about undoing!
Thanks for the help!
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@Jack Hern said "why SourceLinker did not auto link the source to the Residence is an unknown."
Actually, that is completely known. The ability to tag sources to most conclusions was added fairly recently (in early 2023, I believe), and the Source Linker was updated to automatically add those tags even later than that.
So the 1930 and 1940 census entries you mentioned had no chance at all to be tagged to the Residence conclusions, and even the 1950 census would be unlikely to have been attached after the Source Linker had implemented automatic source tagging for all conclusions added via the Source Linker.
So it's up to us as users to manually add source tags for conclusions that were created before the source linker was updated to automatically add those source tags.
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@Jack Hern It is perfectly acceptable and is part of Family Tree's design to put the street name in front of the city name so it reads in the usual order for an address:
Yes, this entry is correctly standardized and functions fine in all Family Tree routines. You can quickly check which standard it is linked to by clicking on the entry to open the Data View window:
If it were not standardized it would look like this:
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