Sealing to parents with parents names not shown.

Geanette Brown

I have an ancestor that has been sealed to his parents, but the parents names are not listed. There is a message stating "This sealing-to-parents ordinance is valid, but the parents are not listed because of privacy or they may not match those in Family Tree." This person passed away over a hundred years ago, so it shouldn't be a privacy concern. Why are the parents he was sealed to not be listed in this case? The help says to check for duplicates, but that it is ok to seal them to both sets of parents. It would be so much more helpful and less time consuming to have the names of the parents he was sealed to, so I could research why they don't match and possibly fix the issue without having to seal him again. Is there a way to find this information out?

Gordon Collett

What you are seeing most commonly occurs in one of two situations:

 

1) A person was sealed to parents and subsequent research shows those were the wrong parents. When that person is detached from those parents in Family Tree, because they are not and never were his or her parents, you get the message that you quote.

 

2) A person was sealed to his or her correct parents. Later, a user in Family Tree makes a mistake and accidentally severs the person from those correct parents. This used to be fairly easy to do while merging people. The update in the merge routine last year makes it a lot harder to do.

 

This second situation can occur when someone merges two John Smiths who are thought to be the same even though they have two different set of parents then removes the "incorrect" parents.

 

As with most problems in Family Tree, the solution is the Change Log. As long as the change in parents took place after 2012, you should be able to track through the Change Log what happened and either see that you should just leave the situation the way it is, because the parents were incorrect, or see what parents need to be restored because they were correct. This is also where you can identify bad merges and reverse them.

 

If something happened to a person's parents prior to 2012, it occurred prior to the opening of Family Tree and we cannot reverse it. If you have official documentation, that is an old temple card stamped by the temple or an old Family Group Sheet stamped by the temple when the ordinance was done that shows it was done correctly with the correct parents, sometimes Support can fix this.

 

If you would like a more specific explanation of what happened to your ancestor, post his ID number here and I would be happy to take a look and see if I can tell what is going on.

Dennis J Yancey

I believe this happens when a perosn has been sealed to multiple sets of parents over time.

You may wish to conact FS Support (feedback) to get a more specific answer.