Home› Welcome to the FamilySearch Community!› Ask a Question› Family Tree

How to select Surviving person in merge

Wes Jester
Wes Jester ✭
June 3 edited June 3 in Family Tree

I have 2 individuals that are actually the same person. Another editor has marked them as not the same based on evidence they had. I have since established definitive evidence they are the same person. I would like to merge my person into the second person and add my evidence to the record. However, when I try to setup the merge, only my individual survives. I would like to be able to reverse that, but can't seem to find a way.

Can anyone suggest a way to do it.

Thanks

Wes

Tagged:
  • merge by ID number
0

Best Answer

  • Jack Hern
    Jack Hern ✭✭✭
    June 4 Answer ✓

    At the top of the Merge panel, note the two direction arrow to "Switch"; as well as the comments describing the Surviving Person & the Possible Duplicate.

    With all chosen information coming over to the Surviving Person, the only thing that may change is the surviving PID (person ID) within the system. The FS system will track the old PID in case anyone choses to undo the merge. Or if LDS and Temple work is done with the old PID printed Temple Cards - the work will be properly updated when logged into the Temple office after work is completed, and update to the new and current PID.

    Screenshot 2025-06-03 164502.png
    3

Answers

  • dlmelville
    dlmelville ✭✭✭
    June 4

    sometimes (for whatever reason) the "switch" option is not available, so you are unable to change the "surviving" individual. In that case, you just have to "go with the system" and complete the merge.

    1
  • JulianBrown38
    JulianBrown38 ✭✭✭
    June 4

    There was some discussion here a while ago about the cases where there is no option to switch the profiles. In those cases, a message is displayed to the effect that the profiles can be merged, but only in the direction that the merge process has determined. The result of the discussion was that this tended to happen when one of the profiles already had significantly more information than the other. This would probably be done to minimize the amount of information that needs to be copied from one profile to the other during the merge.

    1
Clear
No Groups Found

Categories

  • All Categories
  • 43K Ask a Question
  • 3.4K General Questions
  • 571 FamilySearch Center
  • 6.8K Get Involved/Indexing
  • 644 FamilySearch Account
  • 6.5K Family Tree
  • 5.2K Search
  • 1K Memories
  • 2 Suggest an Idea
  • 476 Other Languages
  • 62 Community News
  • Groups