Ok so I really screwed up my tree. I was trying to merge 2 people into one and somehow managed to me
I had tree marriages for him. his Id is GW3B-943. I tried to delete them but all I managed to do was remove one of the persons he was married to. So unmerge is no longer an option that I know of and I have deleted the relationship on 2 of the 3 but I still have his name there and no spouse. Any ideas for on how I can restore my tree? Thanks in advance. Rich
Answers
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Hello Richard Jones,
It appears that you have Heinrich Reinhold Schaller GWB-943 attached with two women and Luther Roy Schaller listed with two mothers and then with only Heinrich Reinhold Schaller alone.
All of the Heinrich Reinhold Schaller's GW3B-943 are attached to Lluther Roy Schaller L5FD-FT4.
So, if the two Anna's are the same person with different numbers you can merge them.
Go to one of the Anna's pages, for instance G7R1-V79. On the right side of the Details page for that Anna, you can click on "Merge by ID". Then put the other Anna's number in the space provided GMJW-ZZ. Then evaluate the two Anna's to see if they are the same. The one you don't chose will be deleted after the merge.
The following are answers to your question which you can find in the question mark near your name on the right of a person page.
How do I undo a merge in Family Tree?
How do I merge duplicates in my private space in Family Tree?
I am hopeful this will help you. Merges are really confusing I think.
If you end up with Luther Roy Schaller L5FD-FT4. still alone with his father, you can add wife/mother to the alone Heinrich Reinhold Schaller GWB-943.
If this is not helpful you can call 840-406-1830, then select Family Tree from the offered choices.
Thank you .
Sister Whittle
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RichardJones248,
The link that AnitraW gave on undoing a merge is a good one. An UNMERGE operation is the best if it is possible because it completely reverses the merge that was performed.
However, if anything on the surviving PID after a merge is touched or altered, the UNMERGE operation is not permitted (there are numerous reasons why this must behave this way). In the event that an UNMERGE is not possible, you must manually RESTORE the PID that was deleted during the merge. Then you must go through the surviving PID from the merge and manually remove all the data, relationships, and sources that it inherited from the other (now RESTORED) PID during the merge.
Just some general thoughts here on merging.
The merge operation is so that 2 separate PIDs in the system that both represent the same exact person in real life can be combined. If you think that 2 records might be representing the same person, THAT is NOT a good enough reason to go ahead and merge them! You must KNOW as much as possible that they are the same person. If you do this first, you will almost NEVER have to detach parents, children, or spouses from a record during or after a merge* (see NOTE below). You should almost never have significant differences in any vitals data between the two records that you are merging. If you do, it is a sure clue that something isn’t right and you are probably missing something.
Since a merge brings ALL parent, child, and spouse type relationships from BOTH records into the final merged record, they should never need to be trimmed in any way during or after the merge if the two records being merged are, in fact, for the same person. Prior to the merge, all the relationships for both records needs to be examined closely to ensure that you are not merging records of different people that just so happened to have lived in the same area around the same time and had family members with similar names. This is a VERY COMMON issue in different places in the world. Once you have merged 2 different persons into one, it is difficult to separate them. You might get the section of the tree that you are working on once again looking “correct”, but you’ve damaged a different part of the tree. That means you have to go back and study that other part of the tree (likely one that you are not even related to) in order to correct that damage as well.
So prior to merging, always make sure that ALL of the data, sources, and relationships for both records appears correct for the same identical person before starting a merge.
Another note is that when examining other possible duplicates, make sure that all the vitals, relationships, and SOURCES on any “possible duplicates” make sense for the person that you are working on. You will occasionally find records where non-duplicates have been merged making the record schizophrenic (i.e., it is actually representing two DIFFERENT persons). The search engine finds the parts of that record that seem to be a duplicate of yours and suggests it to you as a duplicate. If you go ahead and merge it into your record, you have now embedded parts of the previously incorrectly merged record into yours. Now it is totally possible that someone may come along trying to fix a branch of the tree that the previous incorrect merge damaged. Since the person that they are looking for is incorrectly embedded in the record you are using, they may chew up your merge that you just performed trying to get THEIR ancestor’s record back into their part of the tree where it was originally highjacked from by some other person.
*NOTE: There are those in the communities that believe that the new merge function SHOULD NOT allow trimming of relationships during a merge operation. It should be done as a separate operation that can be seen in the change history logs prior to the merge (a whole different discussion).
Anyway, hope this gives you some ideas.
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Wow. I'm saving.
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Thank you so much! I'll try that and see if I can manage not to screw it up again!!!!!
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Thanks a million!!!!!
Rich
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"If you end up with Luther Roy Schaller L5FD-FT4. still alone with his father, you can add wife/mother to the alone Heinrich Reinhold Schaller GWB-943.
This is exactly what I ended up with so now before I do anything else if I add 'wife/mother' to the alone Heinrich Reinhold Schaller can I then get rid of that relationship so I only end up with one marriage and son? How would I proceed in order to end up with just the one relationship? thanks in advance. Rich
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BTW, I hope that my note did not come across as condescending or anything. I've just found that making sure that all of those issues are dealt with BEFORE the merge is started avoids a lot of messy issues. I know that FS has tried to make all those capabilities available in the merge tool, but I think that it is just too complicated to do it all there. Preparation is needed before you even start that tool IMHO.
Also one other thing about incorrect merges that I didn't mention. A merge also brings together all of the temple ordinance statuses. For example, if Person A has no ordinances completed, and a DIFFERENT person B has all of them completed, and then you (incorrectly) merge Person B into Person A, the following occurs:
- Person B PID gets deleted/archived
- The surviving Person A PID is marked as having all ordinances done.
If the incorrect merge of the two persons is discovered early enough and an UNMERGE is performed, everything goes back as it was prior to the MERGE. But if the UNMERGE is not available and you must perform a RESTORE on the deleted/archived Person B PID, you must manually clean up and remove everything from the Person A PID that the merge originally brought over from Person B.
HOWEVER, since we cannot "clean up" or change the ordinance statuses on the Person A PID, Person A is now showing as having all ordinances completed even though they have not been. This means that the Person A PID will never have their ordinance work done because it is incorrectly marked as all completed now.
This was a nuisance where after correcting a bad merge you always had to put in a ticket to get FS to change the ordinance statuses on Person A PID back to what they were prior to the merge. FS was supposed to correct this so that a RESTORE on a PID that was deleted through a merge would also restore the ordinance information on the other surviving PID of the merge as well.
Unfortunately, this can get extremely complicated in the code when the merge involved was part of a series of merges on those same persons. Computationally "unwinding" all of that history to put things back where they belong would be formidable.
Since I have not recently experimented with this at all, I do not know whether or not this has been corrected yet (I hope it has). If it has not, then undoing an incorrect merge using the RESTORE operation mandates a new ticket being created and sent to the help desk in order to complete the cleanup relative to the ordinance statuses.
Also note that his same problem occurs with ANY data copied over during a merge that you are normally not allowed to alter. Discussions have this same type of problem. If you are trying to undo a bad merge that brought over Discussions, when you do the RESTORE, those Discussion show up on the restored PID, but you would normally have to then go and delete them from the other PID. Unfortunately, if you were not the creator of those discussions, you cannot delete them. So now you have discussions on a PID that have absolutely nothing to do with it and you can't remove them. Furthermore, since the discussions are the same as the one on the restored PID, if you edit the one on the incorrect PID, any changes you make are ALSO reflected on the correct PID. So adding a comment to the one on the incorrect PID stating something like "This discussion doesn't belong here and I cannot delete it" will ALSO show up in the discussion on the CORRECT PID!
This situation has existed for many months without fix as well.
So again, the best solution by far is to avoid incorrect merges, and when checking the PIDs you plan to use in a merge, first ensuring that neither of them are the results of a PREVIOUS incorrect merge.
The more incorrect merges that you combine, the more impossible it becomes to fix them.
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Not at all; I'm really glad to have all the information that I can use. I never took it that way and was glad that someone answered me! a lot of time in forums you can ask a question and no one responds, so keep up the good work.
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