Could creating a new profile to separate conflated ones affect ordinance work?
I am having ongoing problems since creating a separate ID from one that had been used to attach records and relationships relating to two individuals of very similar identity. Another user, who is closely connected to one of the individuals concerned, insists on reattaching the wrong spouse to one of the profiles, as well as sources that are connected to the new profile I needed to create.
I suspect she may have carried out ordinance work regarding at least one of the couples and feels my work may have an adverse affect on any temple work. For privacy reasons (hers more than mine) I do not wish to reference the profiles concerned on a public forum, but - not being a member of the Church - would like her to be reassured that I am not doing anything wrong / harmful.
It is possible I am mistaken and our current "edit wars" is purely down to a neurological condition she admits is causing problems in her understanding my detailed explanations and justification for what I have done. Either way, is it possible for an experienced Church member / employee to message me privately, with a view of examining the IDs in question to see if there is a way this issue might be resolved amicably?
I know there is an option of contacting Support, but my experience in going down that route in the past has not been one that has led to a fruitful conclusion.
Otherwise, even a comment here regarding there being no issue in my creating the required new ID for the "other" individual would be of help.
Answers
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In fact, the answer to your title is "Yes," @Paul W
I recently suggested creating a new profile when there were many bad merges, resulting in an impossible tangle. I was privately reprimanded for the suggestion because of the impact on existing ordinance work.
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It might, but everything can be fixed. There is a moderator or administrator over in the Temple group who either fixes such problems or sends them to be fixed and is really good at helping out. I'll post a message to him over there since I don't know if he has or wants any involvement in these public boards and ask him to check this topic to see if he can can contact you, Paul, through a private message and help out with this.
I have had several times when the only way to fix a badly mangled profile was to create new ones. When I had them all fixed, I then put in a request to have the ordinance work sorted out. The official ordinance work records are kept in a separate database and are based on the individual's identifying information at the time they were done. The display of them in Family Tree can be corrected based on the information at the time they were completed and is not dependent on what happened to the profile before or after.
I do highly prefer unmerging since that is less work for the administrators to fix since the ordinance page fixes itself which is handy for people who cannot see the ordinance page. But sometimes there is no choice but to create a new profile. If such was the case with the profile you made the recommendation on, Áine, then no reprimand was called for.
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Thank you, Gordon, I would appreciate that. I would stress that I am not 100% sure of an "ordinance factor" here, but would be pleased if the two profiles could be examined privately, as well as those for their respective spouses. I would obviously be glad to pass the details over, on contact, to an employee / volunteer acting in an official capacity. This is a particularly sensitive issue, in view of the user's apparently fragile state of mind, so I am trying not to upset her too much. Perhaps I should just walk away, but I have become so involved in trying to establish the different identities of around SIX individuals of the same name, born within about 5 miles radius in the same time period, that it would be difficult to cut off my concern over the integrity of their profiles! However, I would stress the problem here involves just the TWO individuals (and their spouses).
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@Gordon Collett said…
I do highly prefer unmerging since that is less work for the administrators to fix since the ordinance page fixes itself which is handy for people who cannot see the ordinance page.
As a non-LDS person, that is my preferred method since (a) it is usually easier for me and (b) my understanding is that it is more efficacious (such a grown-up word!) for LDS matters. And I wouldn't want to knowingly give Church members more work to do if it doesn't impact on my work.
But sometimes there is no choice but to create a new profile.
Quite so. I suspect that there are all sorts of reasons why creating a new profile may be my end-choice. If a profile is merge upon merge upon merge, I may get lost among the weeds and fail to find all of the original profiles to unmerge. If I recall correctly, my poor put upon 5G GPs Samuel Windsor and Mary Bowker had been merged with either 3 or 4 couples named Samuel and Mary Windsor from the length and breadth of England of the 1700s. I successfully found the original profiles for all but one of those couples and un-deleted them. But one Samuel and Mary pair eluded me - maybe they were merged into one of the other coupled that I un-deleted before the merge into my 5G GPs. Or maybe they had been "merged" before the creation of FS FamilyTree - no idea. So I had to create a new pair of profiles for them.
So I'll honestly try but there is a limit to my abilities and patience. I just have to trust that someone can eventually find and sort out any ordinance issues that I unwittingly leave behind - for instance, if the dates of ordinance work were such that my 5G-GPs are still linked in ordinances to children born hundreds of miles away from them, then I can't know and I don't want to know. (Which is an issue that, I guess, may happen regardless of how I tackled those un-merges…)
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One situation where you have no choice but to create new profiles is when two or more profiles were merged (or combined as it was called then) in New Family Search between when it first opened in about 1999 and when it closed in 2012. You can determine this by looking in the old change log (I really wish the new one wouldn't hide this!) and seeing that the information as first imported into Family Tree in the spring of 2012 was already a big mess.
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Thank you for your "referral"! I was contacted almost immediately and, after providing full details, am assured the ordinance work has been now correctly adjusted. I'm advised the problem dates back to an earlier incorrect merge, so apparently not directly connected to my recent separation of the conflated profile(s).
Unfortunately, I still have to face the prospect of the incorrect spouse being constantly attached (by another user) to the subject of my newly created profile, but as long as the ordinance issue has been fixed my post has been addressed.
Thanks again for passing this to someone you knew could help.
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You are certainly welcome.
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