Merging family relationships
In the older merge experience it was possible not to merge all of the familial relationships. I was merging a son from the mother's first marriage who was called by his stepfather's name on the 1900 census. The only way I could figure out how to "fix" the relationships was to merge the duplicate records for the son, and then change the relationships on the person page. Is this the new recommended method of doing this? It may be simpler for most FamilySearch users to use this method, but it was nice to be able to fix relationships and merge duplicates in the same operation previously.
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@lertel thank you for your feedback. Can you share the PIDs for the profiles that you are looking at?
We are encouraging people to make edits before or after a merge. If we allow changes during merges, it makes it a lot harder to go back and understand what happened in the merge.
Merges can at times be very complicated and messy. We appreciate your input as we work to improve this process :)
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@lertel Thank's for your feedback!
I would recommend if you know of a problem to fix it first, and then merge.
I'm curious if you were trying to remove a stepfather relationship entirely during the merge, or was it a bad relationship entirely?
We did find that allowing users to remove relationships during merge allowed users to frequently remove relationships that were actually supported by the data and should have been there.
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Came here to ask this as part of my playing w/ New Merge (after enabling all Labs widgets I learned about at our recent local Discovery Days).
I have a good merge w/ son and mother (no father), that I will merge into the complete family. Normally, I would dis-allow the carryover of the single parent relationship. Now I see from @Rhonda Budvarson & @Mary Anna Ebert the reasoning of adding the extra step. Thank you for the background.
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Yes I was about to post the same sort of suggestion. When merging duplicates for a couple of generations (what I call 'zipping up' the multiples in the tree caused by careless imports), it should be possible to keep only the parental relationships to one set of parents so you don't have to remove the duplicate relationship created.
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I sometimes find that I need to merge an individual where one profile has both parents listed and the other has only one parent present. It was very convenient with the old process to just remove the single parent since the correct parent couple was already present. If both the complete couple and the partial couple are retained as duplicate sets of parents it just makes a mess which I have never found a good way to correct. Trying to add the correct spouse to the partial relationship gives an error saying they are already a couple
The only way I have found to fix it is to add a new dummy spouse to the single parent and then merge the dummy spouse into the real spouse. It is much much easier to simply avoid creating this situation in the first place.
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Yes! to the above! Ending up with 2 parental relationships, one of which is only 1 parent (a duplicate from the 2-parent relationship) is very frequent. I used to be able to delete this extra relationship during the merge and now I can't.
With the new merge, I have to go back and delete the 1-parent relationship afterwards.
I appreciate the concern about losing information during a merge. That's a valid issue, and the new merge may be the best way to prevent it.
However, I keep hearing that we need to do it this way in order to be able to understand what happened in a merge if it has to be undone. In my experience, an incorrect merge typically happens because the profiles were messed up in the first place. The only way to remedy that is to look at each source/piece of information separately and figure what belongs to which profile. It's not a matter of undoing the merge at all. You just have to start over with all the sources. (So understanding what happened in the merge is a non-issue IMHO.)
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My latest example was merging profile 1 which had a complete family with spouse and children and profile 2 which had no spouse and one child. This child was already connected to profile 1 with both parents in the complete family. If I can't reject this relationship to profile 2 then this child ends up with two ssetst of parents, both with the identical father, one set with a mother and one set with no mother. If we can't prevent creating this kind of mess, the system needs to be smart enough not to create them in the first place.
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