Merging duplicate Individuals

LegacyUser

Kristine Mackay said: I recently had a problem merging two individuals. I tried everything and it just came up with the message " Will not merge at this time, try again" with no explanation. I had no idea what was wrong, and had no idea what to do so I called in to make a case to find out the problem. But I just kept looking, and finally realized there were too many Collaborates so I deleted the unnecessary ones, and they merged. Before it has always said why two individuals would not merge. If this is a permanent change, I can see where it could cause frustrations and unnecessary work for everyone, involved. I'm not trying to cause problems, but if this could be changed back to telling someone why merges cannot be done it would help. Thank you, Kris Mackay.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I assume that what you mean by "Collaborates" was all of the Notes and Discussions attached to the person record.

Do you happen to remember the approximate number of these that was causing the failure? Typically, you wouldn't have such a limit unless it was astronomical, IMHO.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Oh, and welcome to the forum!

LegacyUser

Kristine Mackay said: There were 22 in one and 44 in another, and I know there can only be 50, but because it did not say whay it could not be merged, I did not look there.

LegacyUser

Kristine Mackay said: It has always said in the past, too many notes, which they have changes to Collaborates, so you knew what the problem was, I guess not any more.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: That's crazy. I can have well over 100 Sources, but I'm limited in the number of Notes I can have on a person record? If this is really the case, then it needs to be corrected by FS.

So instead of trying to build a single unified notes collection that can be used for different things, FS continues to corrupt the cohesion of this feature by creating multiple ALTERNATE places to store this information (e.g., life sketches, discussions, Reason for change/Reason information is correct boxes, etc.) and scattering them all over the website. Now we have the possibility that they are further limiting the original (and likely best) mechanism by putting in limits preventing you from using them.

Theoretically almost worst case, you would need a source derivation logic (i.e., proof) type note for every single tag from a source in the system. That means if I can attach 200 Sources to a person record, I should be able to attach at least 200 Notes as well!

LegacyUser

Kristine Mackay said: Not sources, Colaborates.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: Hi Jeff. The limit of 50 notes is something that I ran into with Pieter Claesen when I spent a month cleaning up his profile and merging all of the duplicates. I wonder if discussions is now counted with the notes to a maximum of 50 or if that only are the number of notes.

The use of the term Collaborates makes sense if both discussions and notes are combined for a total count.

And yes, Kristine, you should have been given a reason. Hopefully, one of the FamilySearch persons who read (but do not always reply) will see this and pass on the lack of explanation to the developers.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: By the way, Jeff, if notes and discussions can eventually be tagged to a person's event or fact, then the number of notes will need to increase accordingly.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yep. And if people were using the notes correctly now (even without the tagging) we would already be having problems. But since the site provides at least 4 different ways and places to put the same type of information into, it's no wonder that people rarely run into the limit.

LegacyUser

joe martel said: It does look like there is a limit of 50 Notes on a Person. But the notes can be huge - I think a meg. I think if there was a case to up the Notes limit then that could be suggested.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: I can't remember, but during a merge, are all notes unconditionally brought over (as they should be)? If so, then you could not have a TOTAL of more than 50 notes divided between the 2 PIDs in order to successfully merge.

That might take a lot of manual merging of notes prior to the actual merge :-)

LegacyUser

Kristine Mackay said: notes are automatically merged unless the final total would be more than 50

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: They were automatically brought old using the merge system that existed two years ago when I cleaned up Pieter Claesen's record. I believe the system is still automatically combining notes.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: And yes, I spent a lot of time, recording the notes in Notepad to combine the duplicate notes and then enter them as either a Discussion or a new Note, deleting the old. It was a long and tedious process, something that I had to do with some of the existing duplicates. There are now 14 Collaborate Discussions and Notes for Pieter, four of which are discussions and ten notes.