Hi! Am sort of new and through my haste, I made an error in merging. KD9S-32S If you look at this ID
James McLean and wife Mary Clarke - I tried to reverse merge to start again, but it does not work. How do I clean these two IDs up to be correct? many thanks
Answers
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What youare seeing - multiple versions of the father and mother for each child - is quite "normal" for FamilySearch.
What has happened - is that each christening of each child is an individual event and each creates its own version for the parents each time.
It is a task we - the users of FamilySearch - are called upon to do - is to merge the multiple versions of each parent - if we are convinced they are the same family of children (generally cross verified by census or other records that show the family group).
So, if you are convinced all the noted chilren are of the same family - carry on merging the duplicated parents until you are left with one set of parents for the complete family.
Be ultra careful in the merges to ensure all the sources and key information is brought across in each merge - the new merge process does this for us so best advice is not to interfere with the process.
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8 versions is quite a low number - I have dealt with a family of 12 children where the parish records have been indexed 3 times - giving 36 versions each for the father and mother - plus, of course their multiple marriage records.
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This a a great reply. I do extensive work on merging individuals and checking the sources to substantiate the merge is correct. You didn't do anything wrong, it just takes time to merge the duplicate individuals. I can help your through this if you would like.
Carol
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FWIW, one of the original databases that FS had could not show multiple relationships. So instead of a single entry for a family with all the children in the database, you had to store each "piece" as a separate record. If I remember correctly, when they went to load all those old records into the new database, it would have been far too much work to manually recombine all of them, so a choice was made to just bring them all in directly and allow the patrons to merge the duplications as they do their work in the Tree.
These all mainly existed before the current FSFT, so their "creation" dates in the history logs will usually be 2012--the year that the old "New" FamilySearch FamilyTree was converted into the FSFT that we now have.
Note that one downside to all of these duplicates (besides the fact that there are just lots of them) is that since they came from a lot of original records such as extraction records, they don't have a lot of extra information in them to help uniquely identify them. So you do need to be careful who they are being merged with.
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hi Carol, Thankyou for your offer, yes please can you help me? I have merged some, but I think I did merge an incorrect one with different parents - so when I saw this, I immediately stopped and tried to reverse the merge. I thought if I was able to cancel everything that I had done, then start again SLOWLY, I might get it right. there were numerous ID's for both the father and mother.
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I do have James McLean death certificate. His Father was John McLean and his mother was Margaret S Campbell. James died 1912/03/03
1st wife Mary Clarke. He also had a 2nd wife Janet Davidson or Peebles.
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Thankyou everyone for you assistance, and sorting out this problem. I now understand:)
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I hope we have been of some help to you. Please feel free to contact us with more questions. Carol
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