What is the best way to merge recently deceased individual so there's only one in the tree?
A woman recently passed away who had several children, several grand children and even great grandchildren on FamilySearch. With her passing all of a sudden we have dozens of copies of records with her name with different ID numbers. This is because each of her offspring would have a separate version of her since she was living - and now by marking her deceased we have a plethora of records. What is the best way to resolve this issue? Is it merge by merge or is there a quicker way?
Thanks for your help!
Susanne
Mejor Respuesta
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I like to keep the number that is assigned when the ward clerk notifies the church that the person is deceased. the ID number for a deceased church member starts with a K, so many if not most IDs that start with a K indicate that the person was a member during their life. Since all personal information is easily moved, I transfer it to the record beginning with a K, and merge into that record.
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@Susanne Skabelund Unfortunately, there is not a one-and-done way to merge a zillion copies of a person. Maybe one way to eat this elephant would be for each descendant to do a merge of his or her copy to whichever copy you decide should be the surviving record. Otherwise, 1 person is going to become much more of a merge expert than he or she ever wanted to be! You might set up a family group to coordinate the work. Here's a link to a help center article that explains family groups and has links for how to create a group and invite people:
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@Susanne Skabelund , as @N Tychonievich said, merging is not a simple matter :) Here are a couple of webinars that may help, especially the second:
Duplicates in Family Tree, Part 1: Why They're There and How to Find Them
Duplicates in Family Tree, Part 2: How to Resolve Them
Best wishes :)
Kathryn
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This is very interesting! I didn't realize that the record they put in the system is given a "k" record. Makes a lot of sense to merge into the deceased person's work! Love this. Thank you!!
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I have heard people from FamilySearch say that the ID numbers really have no meaning and that starting with a K or any other letter really has no significance. Suggestions that they do is kind of a myth floating around. Order of merging really doesn't matter in the least. Sometimes we are forced to merge in one direction but this is because there is something in the surviving record, such as the number of notes or other items in the record would break the merge routine if done in the opposite direction.
But getting back to the original question, we do just need to merge each duplicate one at a time.
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As @Gordon Collett said, this is indeed mythology with absolutely no basis in fact. The fact is that ID numbers are actually just integers (sometimes very large integers). There is an algorithm that converts those integers into the "xxxx-xxx" kind of identifier. The IDs that start with K were issued before those that start with L, but you can't draw any other conclusions. It's even true that those that start with G were issued after those that start with L, so there's not even any meaning to alphabetical order. Please don't pass on this misleading myth.
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