Thanks for this video, I picked up the PDF too...helped me fix an intergenerational situation I had agonised over for months! And yes I did have all the proofs to change it, I just didn't know how - thanks again
Thanks Aimée, I have a "duplicate dad" floating around on FamilySearch and didn't know how to fix it. Now I know and will merge. I always learn something from your videos. Thank You
Thanks for the guidance on multiple wives that appear during a merge. Great idea to keep them so they aren't lost. Then one can see more needs to be done to fix up the multiple Anns like in your example. Just because her surnames wasn't known doesn't mean it's the same person. And when there are later children born, it's possible that he remarried after the death of the earlier spouse. I have that exact situation with an ancestor. We can't confirm her surname, but she is named in the will.
Thank you for this video. I needed to learn how to merge, delete, and change relationships. Perfect timing. Very nice to meet you at RootsTech 2024. Thanks for organizing the lunch meet-up. Looking forward to another year of your videos and RT2025! -Erica
Exactly why I no longer work a tree on family search. I don't have time to be correcting all the wrong information (I'm talking obviously wrong information) everyone wants to add to my people. I have enough problems trying to make sure MY information is correct to worry about everyone else's information too. Could their information be correct and mine wrong? Absolutely. But let ME make the changes on MY terms. I now use family search ONLY for searching for records I may not be able to find elsewhere and I work my tree only on Ancestry where I can keep MY tree separate from everyone else's.
The more I try to work with Family Search, the more I don't like working with the tree. I like the documents I get but I just don't find it a seamless experience.
I wish that family search had a space where you could put information that you need to research more. I appreciated you sharing all these features. I use them weekly in my family tree.
Hi Aimee and Bridget. On this question, there is a tasks area on your homepage on FS, lower right. When I was just getting started that is where I put my reminders of things I needed to do.@@AncestryAimee
I'm learning a lot from your videos, but I have one question that I haven't seen addressed yet. Maybe I just haven't seen the right video yet, if so, please direct me to the one I need to see. Often times on the tree I see children have what appears to be an extra parent, but the "extra" is not a different profile, but the same parent with the same ID. I want to clean that up but I'm not seeing how to do it. Also, understanding why it is happening would be helpful. I believe it happens in the process of merging, and I'm not sure if it has to do with the order of who gets merged first. An explanation on how to prevent it when we can, and how to fix it when we can't prevent it, would be so helpful. Thanks!
I haven’t actually addressed that. That’s a great question. Without seeing it I’m not actually sure, but I do think that it may have to do with the spouse. A parent will be listed twice if there is a discrepancy in the spouse. So I would check the marriages and add the missing parent to that child relationship and they should come together.
Aimee thank you for this video, some how my father in-law was attached to my mother in-law as her husband and father. I tried to merge & remove but wasn’t able, I will follow your instructions and hope for the best. Thanks Randy
FS has been great for documentation on my mom’s Burgenland region relatives, where the records are in Hungarian. However, it looks like when FS imported the records, they created a new person for EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT. Some of this is down to the documents being in Hungarian or in Latin, depending on if they are civil or Church records. But for example, if there are records for the birth, marriage, and children of a particular couple? There could be different profiles for their birth/baptism record, another for their marriage, one for each child, one for their own death, and in some cases, another when one of their children died! A couple weeks ago, I went on a bit of a merge spree for the village. 😂 It’s a small village, even to this day, so when I was confident it was the same person/family, I merged and then added the name variations in the AKA section. In the process, I very likely found additional connections for my mom’s ancestors from that village-ones that wouldn’t have been obvious if I were specifically looking for those individuals, but when I was just looking at the multiple profiles and associated records, they easily fell into place.
Yes! That happens a lot. You can see it when you look at changes. If FamilySearch added the information/person - it came from a record such as that. :) Thanks so much Kristen!
Great video! Very helpful. I am wondering if you have any videos on reversing a merge. Someone merged my grandfather with another person with the same name living in the same county born 2 days apart but I have confirmed they are two different people
Look at the history or “latest changes” (on the left) and see if you can undo it there. I don’t have a video on that. Good suggestion. You can always reach out to FS help for additional help too.
Your presentation made me think of an unrelated question: what if a man and woman had their child out of wedlock? I assume we show it as a "marriage" in Family Search, as that is kind of synonymous with "parental relationships"? I wouldn't want a wife deleted if there was no evidence of a marriage if she is the correct mother to the children.
That's a FANTASTIC question - should have covered it, so I'm pinning it to the top. If you have a couple that lived together, divorced, annulment, or were in a common law marriage, you can click on the pencil by the marriage and add an EVENT - see the down arrow at the right and change it from marriage to one of the other. They may not have even lived together, but there is no other option there. After you have done that, you see "Lived Together" under the couple, rather than "Marriage." You can also add date and place as well.
❤ @ancestryaimee Many have this issue in their trees, sometimes several times. It shows up especially where there is an NPE situation, they didn’t live together, may not have had a relationship (rape, one night stands, or even with in-vitro fertilization with a stranger’s DNA, etc). Sometimes it’s offensive to us that these sites infer a marriage when there is a child produced between two people. Then comes the adoption situations and how to set preferred parent, preferred partner, etc. Have you made or can you make a video about dealing with divergent / nonstandard relationships?
Everybody begins somewhere! Use a different program like Ancestry or MyHeritage or something you can put on your computer like Rootsmagic which syncs with FamilySearch. That’s a private program or a personal tree. Make your mistakes there and then you can share on FamilySearch when you know what you’ve got is right. It’ll save you a lot of time in the long run actually. Plus it’ll be a place where you have a secure tree in case somebody else makes changes.
Following bad advice, I purposely deleted a major person in my tree: My family is from Cuba, arriving in the U.S. IN 1960. My research has been based on word of mouth and an old hand written tree that one of my relatives brought. My great grandparents were first cousins, and as a result I had two identical lines in my tree. I was trying to clean up my tree, and was told to just remove the first ancestor on only one of the great grandparents, which I did. I removed the person by just deleting him on the tree tracing my great grandmother. Unfortunately it removed the person from both grandparents and thereby deleting all the persons, on both sides, going back on that line. The hand written tree goes back to 1730, but using other family trees on Ancestry, I traced this line to the early 1600s. I put the names from the handwritten tree back on (3 weeks ago), but they no longer produce leaves. I can't use documents as Cuba refuses to open records. Is there any way to get those leaves back? Can I fix this?
FamilySearch doesn’t really delete people out of the tree. They’re probably in there somewhere you’re just not finding them. You probably deleted relationships more than the person, unless you had the person and nobody else had touched them. Then you could delete. I would search for the person thoroughly first. If you are still struggling, you may want to reach out to me for coaching. I could walk you through it. I have space in my Wednesday group coaching session at 12:30 PM Pacific time. It’s on the second Wednesdays and it’s only $35.
If this is an Ancestry tree, the other people are still there! They’re in what you might call an orphaned branch-it’s not connected to the main tree, so you won’t see it. Go to the Tree Overview. On the right side, you’ll see the home person, the last person you worked on, and then a Summary section. Under Summary, click on People. EVERYONE who is part of the “tree,” even members of those orphaned branches, will be listed there, with all the sources, media, etc you had previously attached to them. If you know the name of one of the parents of the person you deleted, then re-added, you can find them there, click their name, and then edit the relevant relationships to that person.
Aimme I received an email from Family Search saying Abraham Lincoln is my 3rd cousin four times removed. I haven’t worked on that part of my tree but how much trust should I put into it? Thanks Randy
Good question. I don’t know. They have him locked down so the generations around him are pretty reliable. I would be interested in the folks in your tree between you.
Hi Randy. My husband is related to Abe Lincoln on Abe's maternal side. Abraham's family tree includes several locations in central Kentucky (Boyle, Mercer, Marion, and a few others). One thing you can do is check your own tree for any family that may have been in that area at any time, and start looking there. You can also follow the suggested path of relationship and look at the amount and quality of research done along the way and determine if there are still questions. Though Lincoln has no living descendants today, there are many people living who are related to him in some other cousin type connection. Some relationships are more direct than others, and are of varying degrees. If your suggested connection is on the Lincoln (Abraham's paternal) side, I believe there is less controversy involved on that side of the tree. Lincoln's maternal side had some big question marks and disagreements in the past, and there has been some DNA studies done to help determine the family his mother belonged to and conclusions made based on that. Some of that information I believe is available (including a web link for more info) on the profile page (check the Sources and Collaboration tabs) for Abraham Lincoln on FamilySearch. I recently viewed that profile and it appeared to reflect the conclusions of the DNA study. You can also get ahold of the Forkland Community Center in Boyle County, KY and ask for information from them. They have a small family history center that contains information about many of the families in central Kentucky who have known connections to Abraham. They have a Facebook page and recently posted that they have just acquired a large collection from a genealogist that pertains to Abraham Lincoln, but didn't go into detail about what all that includes. Their Facebook page does have an email address for contact, and they give times when their center is open to the public, but I'm not sure if any material they have has been digitized. I hope this helps you.
How would one represent double dating as a Standardized date? Old records might indicate a birth date as 5 - 11 mon - 1663. The 11th month was actually Jan, so this date would techincally be 5 January 1663/4, but FS won't accept this as a standardized date.
Thanks for this video, I picked up the PDF too...helped me fix an intergenerational situation I had agonised over for months! And yes I did have all the proofs to change it, I just didn't know how - thanks again
Wonderful! So glad both the video and handout helped!
Thanks Aimée, I have a "duplicate dad" floating around on FamilySearch and didn't know how to fix it. Now I know and will merge. I always learn something from your videos. Thank You
Fantastic! So glad this is helping you!
Thanks for the guidance on multiple wives that appear during a merge. Great idea to keep them so they aren't lost. Then one can see more needs to be done to fix up the multiple Anns like in your example. Just because her surnames wasn't known doesn't mean it's the same person. And when there are later children born, it's possible that he remarried after the death of the earlier spouse. I have that exact situation with an ancestor. We can't confirm her surname, but she is named in the will.
Thanks for adding that!
Thank you for this video. I needed to learn how to merge, delete, and change relationships. Perfect timing. Very nice to meet you at RootsTech 2024. Thanks for organizing the lunch meet-up. Looking forward to another year of your videos and RT2025! -Erica
Thanks Erica! It was terrific to meet you as well and I can’t wait for RT2025! Glad this video will be helpful to you.
Exactly why I no longer work a tree on family search. I don't have time to be correcting all the wrong information (I'm talking obviously wrong information) everyone wants to add to my people. I have enough problems trying to make sure MY information is correct to worry about everyone else's information too. Could their information be correct and mine wrong? Absolutely. But let ME make the changes on MY terms. I now use family search ONLY for searching for records I may not be able to find elsewhere and I work my tree only on Ancestry where I can keep MY tree separate from everyone else's.
You’re not alone. I like sharing with others but I absolutely have my tree on Ancestry!
wow happy to see this. Sometimes I think I create more problems when I try to correct something.
So glad this is helpful to you!
Lots of mistakes on my Family Search Tree. Great information on how to handle some of these issues. Thanks Aimee!!
You're so welcome!
The more I try to work with Family Search, the more I don't like working with the tree. I like the documents I get but I just don't find it a seamless experience.
It’s not very user friendly, that’s for sure.
I wish that family search had a space where you could put information that you need to research more.
I appreciated you sharing all these features. I use them weekly in my family tree.
Great suggestion! FS are you listening? You could add a note and even make it a caution note.
Hi Aimee and Bridget. On this question, there is a tasks area on your homepage on FS, lower right. When I was just getting started that is where I put my reminders of things I needed to do.@@AncestryAimee
This is great! I haven't come across these problems yet, but will remember to get the handout when I do.
Thank you! Glad it's helpful to you.
I'm learning a lot from your videos, but I have one question that I haven't seen addressed yet. Maybe I just haven't seen the right video yet, if so, please direct me to the one I need to see.
Often times on the tree I see children have what appears to be an extra parent, but the "extra" is not a different profile, but the same parent with the same ID. I want to clean that up but I'm not seeing how to do it.
Also, understanding why it is happening would be helpful. I believe it happens in the process of merging, and I'm not sure if it has to do with the order of who gets merged first. An explanation on how to prevent it when we can, and how to fix it when we can't prevent it, would be so helpful. Thanks!
I haven’t actually addressed that. That’s a great question. Without seeing it I’m not actually sure, but I do think that it may have to do with the spouse. A parent will be listed twice if there is a discrepancy in the spouse. So I would check the marriages and add the missing parent to that child relationship and they should come together.
If you’ve tried removing the duplicate parent and it won’t “take”, try removing the child relationship instead.
Aimee thank you for this video, some how my father in-law was attached to my mother in-law as her husband and father. I tried to merge & remove but wasn’t able, I will follow your instructions and hope for the best.
Thanks
Randy
If you change the relationships it should fix it. If not, reach out to FS help.
FS has been great for documentation on my mom’s Burgenland region relatives, where the records are in Hungarian. However, it looks like when FS imported the records, they created a new person for EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT. Some of this is down to the documents being in Hungarian or in Latin, depending on if they are civil or Church records. But for example, if there are records for the birth, marriage, and children of a particular couple? There could be different profiles for their birth/baptism record, another for their marriage, one for each child, one for their own death, and in some cases, another when one of their children died!
A couple weeks ago, I went on a bit of a merge spree for the village. 😂 It’s a small village, even to this day, so when I was confident it was the same person/family, I merged and then added the name variations in the AKA section. In the process, I very likely found additional connections for my mom’s ancestors from that village-ones that wouldn’t have been obvious if I were specifically looking for those individuals, but when I was just looking at the multiple profiles and associated records, they easily fell into place.
Yes! That happens a lot. You can see it when you look at changes. If FamilySearch added the information/person - it came from a record such as that. :) Thanks so much Kristen!
Great video! Very helpful. I am wondering if you have any videos on reversing a merge. Someone merged my grandfather with another person with the same name living in the same county born 2 days apart but I have confirmed they are two different people
Look at the history or “latest changes” (on the left) and see if you can undo it there. I don’t have a video on that. Good suggestion. You can always reach out to FS help for additional help too.
Your presentation made me think of an unrelated question: what if a man and woman had their child out of wedlock? I assume we show it as a "marriage" in Family Search, as that is kind of synonymous with "parental relationships"?
I wouldn't want a wife deleted if there was no evidence of a marriage if she is the correct mother to the children.
That's a FANTASTIC question - should have covered it, so I'm pinning it to the top. If you have a couple that lived together, divorced, annulment, or were in a common law marriage, you can click on the pencil by the marriage and add an EVENT - see the down arrow at the right and change it from marriage to one of the other. They may not have even lived together, but there is no other option there. After you have done that, you see "Lived Together" under the couple, rather than "Marriage." You can also add date and place as well.
❤
@ancestryaimee
Many have this issue in their trees, sometimes several times. It shows up especially where there is an NPE situation, they didn’t live together, may not have had a relationship (rape, one night stands, or even with in-vitro fertilization with a stranger’s DNA, etc).
Sometimes it’s offensive to us that these sites infer a marriage when there is a child produced between two people.
Then comes the adoption situations and how to set preferred parent, preferred partner, etc.
Have you made or can you make a video about dealing with divergent / nonstandard relationships?
I’m a semi beginner but I’m so afraid of making mistakes
Everybody begins somewhere! Use a different program like Ancestry or MyHeritage or something you can put on your computer like Rootsmagic which syncs with FamilySearch. That’s a private program or a personal tree. Make your mistakes there and then you can share on FamilySearch when you know what you’ve got is right. It’ll save you a lot of time in the long run actually. Plus it’ll be a place where you have a secure tree in case somebody else makes changes.
Following bad advice, I purposely deleted a major person in my tree: My family is from Cuba, arriving in the U.S. IN 1960. My research has been based on word of mouth and an old hand written tree that one of my relatives brought.
My great grandparents were first cousins, and as a result I had two identical lines in my tree. I was trying to clean up my tree, and was told to just remove the first ancestor on only one of the great grandparents, which I did. I removed the person by just deleting him on the tree tracing my great grandmother. Unfortunately it removed the person from both grandparents and thereby deleting all the persons, on both sides, going back on that line. The hand written tree goes back to 1730, but using other family trees on Ancestry, I traced this line to the early 1600s. I put the names from the handwritten tree back on (3 weeks ago), but they no longer produce leaves. I can't use documents as Cuba refuses to open records.
Is there any way to get those leaves back? Can I fix this?
FamilySearch doesn’t really delete people out of the tree. They’re probably in there somewhere you’re just not finding them. You probably deleted relationships more than the person, unless you had the person and nobody else had touched them. Then you could delete. I would search for the person thoroughly first. If you are still struggling, you may want to reach out to me for coaching. I could walk you through it. I have space in my Wednesday group coaching session at 12:30 PM Pacific time. It’s on the second Wednesdays and it’s only $35.
If this is an Ancestry tree, the other people are still there! They’re in what you might call an orphaned branch-it’s not connected to the main tree, so you won’t see it.
Go to the Tree Overview. On the right side, you’ll see the home person, the last person you worked on, and then a Summary section. Under Summary, click on People. EVERYONE who is part of the “tree,” even members of those orphaned branches, will be listed there, with all the sources, media, etc you had previously attached to them. If you know the name of one of the parents of the person you deleted, then re-added, you can find them there, click their name, and then edit the relevant relationships to that person.
PS - I have used this “people” list to help me find possible duplicates that might have been added over time, too!
Greats additions. Thanks Kristen!
I was the initial person asking. I don’t know the names. The names were generated by other trees. I can’t look up documents because no access in Cuba
Aimme I received an email from Family Search saying Abraham Lincoln is my 3rd cousin four times removed.
I haven’t worked on that part of my tree but how much trust should I put into it?
Thanks
Randy
Good question. I don’t know. They have him locked down so the generations around him are pretty reliable. I would be interested in the folks in your tree between you.
@@AncestryAimee do you have an email I can use to send the tree information
Randy
Hi Randy. My husband is related to Abe Lincoln on Abe's maternal side. Abraham's family tree includes several locations in central Kentucky (Boyle, Mercer, Marion, and a few others). One thing you can do is check your own tree for any family that may have been in that area at any time, and start looking there. You can also follow the suggested path of relationship and look at the amount and quality of research done along the way and determine if there are still questions.
Though Lincoln has no living descendants today, there are many people living who are related to him in some other cousin type connection. Some relationships are more direct than others, and are of varying degrees.
If your suggested connection is on the Lincoln (Abraham's paternal) side, I believe there is less controversy involved on that side of the tree.
Lincoln's maternal side had some big question marks and disagreements in the past, and there has been some DNA studies done to help determine the family his mother belonged to and conclusions made based on that. Some of that information I believe is available (including a web link for more info) on the profile page (check the Sources and Collaboration tabs) for Abraham Lincoln on FamilySearch. I recently viewed that profile and it appeared to reflect the conclusions of the DNA study.
You can also get ahold of the Forkland Community Center in Boyle County, KY and ask for information from them. They have a small family history center that contains information about many of the families in central Kentucky who have known connections to Abraham. They have a Facebook page and recently posted that they have just acquired a large collection from a genealogist that pertains to Abraham Lincoln, but didn't go into detail about what all that includes. Their Facebook page does have an email address for contact, and they give times when their center is open to the public, but I'm not sure if any material they have has been digitized. I hope this helps you.
I have two wives but they show up one at a time on my family tree. What do I do?
I’m not sure how you mean that. I’m the tree it will show one of them. You can select the other though. Does that help?
How do you fix a "Looping Pedigree"
You just have to determine who the correct parents are then change the relationships. Once corrected you’ll eliminate the loop.
How would one represent double dating as a Standardized date? Old records might indicate a birth date as 5 - 11 mon - 1663. The 11th month was actually Jan, so this date would techincally be 5 January 1663/4, but FS won't accept this as a standardized date.
Good point. Yeah. They won’t. I would leave it there and just not have it standardized.
My father shares a mother with his sister, but do not share the same father. How do i put them in the same tree?
Good question. You can add another spouse to his mother and then add the child to that couple.
I have no parents, I want to be adopted