Has there been a change to the merge process?
I have come across this issue several times in the last couple of months following merges by other users. If it was only happening with one user I would say it was a user issue but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Example: Family 1 has father John1, mother Mary1 and daughter Fiona1. Family 2 has father John2, mother Mary2 and four children including Fiona2. Someone (correctly) merges the two Marys but this is when it starts to go wrong.
What happened in the past was that the surviving Mary would have had two husbands called John1 with a daughter Fiona1, and John2 with four children including a Fiona2. It would then be obvious and easy to merge the two Johns and the two Fionas.
What happened now is that following the merge the surviving Mary only has one husband and one family, in this instance John2 and four children. There is no indication that there is more work to be done. Until the system comes up with "Possible Duplicate" suggestions, which it may not, there is nothing to indicate that there is another husband or daughter, and that the two Johns and the two Fiona still have to be merged.
John1 now has no wife. Fiona1 now has no mother. It looks just like Mary1 has been deleted, not merged. It's only by inspecting their Change Histories that you can find there used to be a wife/mother that was deleted by a merge.
I've now seen this three or four times this year. Has anyone else seen anything similar or know what the problem is?
Answers
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I'm not certain, but I think that's just user error. If you're merging Mary1 and Mary2, it should automatically set it to add John2 as husband and Fiona2 as daughter of Mary1. The problem comes if a user removes the relationship during the merge process. The relationships get messed up then.
Here's an example from a merge I recently did:
The wives are duplicates.
Mariae Barbarae has dupcliate husbands.
I go in to merge with Maria Barbara Reibelt as the surviving individual.
The merge will automatically move all relationships of the duplicate to the surviving person's column.
But you can move them out. This will delete the relationship; this is where the user can go wrong.
I finish the merge.
Now, Maria Barbara only shows one husband - the duplicate of the husband is no longer connected to her profile.
And the duplicate of the husband gets left with him showing as the only parent of the children. The only way for a user to figure out that there are still duplicates of the husband out there is if they pop up as a possible duplicate. Otherwise they're very unlikely to be found.
Good luck with your research!
Cody Bailey
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I'm not certain, but I think that's just user error. If you're merging Mary1 and Mary2, it should automatically set it to add John2 as husband and Fiona2 as daughter of Mary1. The problem comes if a user removes the relationship during the merge process. The relationships get messed up then.
Here's an example from a merge I recently did:
The wives are duplicates.
Mariae Barbarae has dupcliate husbands.
I go in to merge with Maria Barbara Reibelt as the surviving individual.
The merge will automatically move the duplicate to the surviving person's column.
But you can move them out. This will delete the relationship. This is where the user can go wrong.
Now, Maria Barbara only shows one husband - the duplicate of the husband is no longer connected to the person.
And the duplicate of the husband gets left with him showing as the only parent of the children. The only way for a user to figure out that there are still duplicates of the husband out there is if they pop up as a possible duplicate. Otherwise they're very unlikely to find them.
Hopefully that helps you understand what's going on.
Good luck!
Cody Bailey
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Thanks Cody.
As a user error that's exactly the way I see it happening. So I guess the question then becomes, "Why have four different users done this recently when I've never seen it (or noticed it) before?"
As you say, the relationships are moved from the left to the right automatically so four different users have chosen to undo that part of a merge. Why?
The only way I have spotted this is where I am following/watching the father or daughter (in my example) that is left without a wife or mother.
I've now seen this twice on my mother's line, once on my father's and once in my wife's family. All in the last few months. I'll leave this open for a while to see if anyone else comes upon the same thing.
Regards, Colin.
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I agree. In working with a patron recently, they thought they should remove the 2nd spouse. I told them that they should leave it so that it would be easy to see that there is more clean-up to do.
I would say that it is user error, but more specifically a lack of understanding on the users part. When the information is duplicated, they don't always understand that there are more merges that need to be completed. Sometimes there is additional information that is new to them and they assume that it is incorrect without doing the needed research to confirm or refute the new information.
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The ability to undo a relationship during a merge is a HUGE mistake in the design of the merge function. You should never be able to rearrange relationships DURING a merge. You are performing a merge because the the PIDs are SUPPOSED to be duplicates. If they have incorrect relationships, they need to be corrected BEFORE the merge.
In fact, by forcing this extra consideration to take place it will many time expose the person about to make a merge with additional information that leads to the discovery that the two PIDs really ARE NOT duplicates, and should NOT be merged! By allowing last minute snap decisions on removing relationships in the merge, it encourages incorrect merges that are extremely difficult to correct (assuming that they are even found in the first place).
Furthermore, relationship changes can be very significant and need their own "Reason for Change" type explanations. They need to exist in their own distinct place in the change history logs and not crammed together sharing a single generic description for the merge along with a dozen other attributes.
When this was put into the new merge process, many folks (including yours truly) harped a lot about it, but here we are a year later and FS has totally ignored all the requests and nothing has changed.
This is one of many areas where FS continues to add features that significantly encourages bad decision making when it comes to merging records.
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After finding several more instances of sources and/or relationships not being carried over, I have finally had a response from one of the users that made a merge.
He says he didn't make the changes in Family Tree, he did it in "Legacy" and then synced it to Family Tree. (Maybe that's why I've had no response to messages until now?)
It seems that this time, at least, seven duplicates of a man were merged. Each one had a variation of the same family with different sources. None of the sources or family members were transferred in the merges and all those families are now without a husband/father.
So, could it be the syncing of Family Tree with other partner programs that is at fault?
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