An interesting quirk: Auto-Merging
I got really confused by something and it took me a while to figure out what happened. People should be made aware of this so that they don't get as confused as I did. Or maybe I'm still confused and this didn't really happen!
I created a test group tree to which I added just my wife and then invited her. She then clicked on the Person List tab in order to copy her own profile from her private space into the group. When she clicked "Just Yourself" it looked like nothing happened. No new profile for her was created in the group. When she tried again, she got the statement that the profile had already been copied. But there was no sign of it.
After a while of poking around, I finally looked at the change log for her group profile and there as the most recent entry was a merge. Neither she nor I had done a merge. Apparently, when a person has accepted an invitation to a group and associated herself with the group profile, the program automatically does a merge when the person tries to copy herself into the group instead of creating a duplicate.
I assume it only does the merge in that specific situation since the person is clearly linked to both the private and the group profile. That's handy but even studying the change log, I can't really tell what was kept in the merge and what, if anything, was discarded.
I'm going to have to make a new group, try this again, and watch closer.
Comments
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I have confirmed this confusing behavior by creating a new group and watching very carefully what happens. I think the program is being too helpful and I would like to personally control what information ends up in the group tree.
1) I created a group with just myself.
2) I went back to add people and added my wife from my space. That went fine.
3) I invited her and she joined the group. No problem.
4) She signed in and went to the the Person List to see just the group copies of her and me:
5) She clicked Copy From FamilySearch Tree and chose the only option, "Just Yourself."
6) Returning to the Person List, nothing changed. There are still just two people. Both of them were created by me.
It looks like nothing at all happened. There is no sign here that she copied herself from her space.
However,
7) Going to her detail page in the group we see this:
Information from her space was added to the profile.
8) Going to the change log for her group profile, we see that a merge was indeed automatically carried out and data fields that were blank in the profile I copied into the tree were filled with information from her space:
Since this merge was automatic she had no control over what actually came from her space to the group. What if she had better vital information in her own copy of herself that I had in my copy? Now one of us would either need to copy that information over by hand or remember to immediately do an unmerge before doing anything else on her profile then redo the merge correctly.
Personally I would rather have the duplicate created when she copies herself into the group left alone and do the merge myself so that I can choose which direction to merge and what information to keep or discard rather than have a duplicate created then immediately and automatically deleted in a merge that is out of my control.
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I think this happened to me too. I invited my husband to my Family Group. I merged all the duplicate children, but I couldn't find his duplicate.
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Thank you for your comments. There is a new Match-Copy procedure when you COPY FROM FAMILYSEARCH TREE. It should show all the individuals you are copying and give you an option to merge them with matched individuals already in your Family Group Tree. Try it out and see if it helps keep from creating too many duplicates, but also gives you control over which individuals you copy into your Family Group Tree.
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