I did a “Count Trees” function and ended up with 2 larger trees (among several smaller ones) in my DB. One has over 6400 people and the other has almost 350 people. I don’t know why the smaller (Uriel Bauder) tree is separate from the larger tree in the first place, but I want to join the Uriel tree with the larger tree. How do I do that? And how do I avoid creating any more “orphan trees” in my DB? Thanks for your consideration - Marti
You would attach Uriel to the proper family in your larger tree. For example maybe you have Uriel’s parents, so you would add Uriel as a child to those parents…or is you have Uriel’s spouse, then add Uriel to that spouse…etc.
@kfunk Thank you for responding. Uriel (b. 1747) has a spouse and father, no information for father - just a name. Should I make a new father in the “Main Tree?” And if I do, how do I know I’m in the Main Tree? Thanks -Marti
This is really more of a question about your family tree than it is about RM. For example, suppose you start with a new RM database. Suppose you add the husband and wife John Doe and Jane Smith. Suppose you also add the husband and wife William Doe and Sarah Jones. You happen to know that John Doe and William Doe were brothers. But if you ran a Count Trees at this point, there would be two trees because the two brothers are not connected.
To connect the two trees, you would need to add parents for the two brothers and to be sure that both brothers were connected to the parents as children. At that point, there would now be just one tree in the RM database. In your case, you will need to find at least one person in the tree of over 6400 people who is connected to at least one person in the tree of almost 350 people. Then you would need to connect those two people as spouses or as parent and child. At that point, your two trees will have become one. If the connection is grandparent and grandchild or something like that, you will have to fill in the intervening generations.
When you run Count Trees, it will list one person from each tree as a representative of that tree. The person chosen from each tree is not exactly chosen at random, but the representative almost might as well as be chosen at random. It’s not like the persons chosen at random from each tree are the two people who need to be linked up as spouses or as parent and child. It’s possible and even likely that the two people you need to connect are two other people altogether. Such connections can be difficult to find in general, and finding them probably will depend on your knowledge of the two trees.
By the way, the “randomly chosen representative” from each tree is actually the lowest numbered person from each tree. But the numbers RM assigns to each person are usually not particularly meaningful.
Uriel Bauder is shown because he owns the smallest RIN (record number) in that particular tree. If You haven’t put your database through too much of a thrash in changes and operations… His low RIN possibly hints about “when” he was entered (in the sequence of adding individuals) w/regard to all people in your database. You may have two records of the same individual. Run Automerge and Duplicate search and merge. Then investigate folks within the same range of RIN numbers as his RIN number. No guarantee, but might help recall who you were adding in that stretch, whom he may have been unlinked from (that is in the larger tree) or point up a gap of 1 or more RINs that are no longer sequential (meaning edits/deletions around that entry time period). Good luck ~
In a large database of over 295,000 individuals, I have 801 separate trees, the biggest having 290,900. There is a possibility that some of these trees have overlapping people, but most “extra trees” come from my choosing to keep all my research in one large family file. Most of us have found people who might be related to our primary tree but know too little about the extra families to connect them to the larger tree at the time we choose to enter them. I find the opportunity to have multiple trees in one database a very useful feature included in RM. To add extra trees to one’s Ancestry database (for example), one has to attach the unconnected people incorrectly to an existing family, then quickly unlink them perhaps creating a mess if one gets distracted.
One way I do find occasional overlapping people in more than one tree is to search the index of names in my RM datafile, looking at similar birth and death dates. Obviously this would be more efficient in a smaller database.
Thank you all for sharing your knowledge and how-to with me. I got Uriel back into the Main DB and that was my major goal. There are a couple of others that I will work on as time goes on, now that I know how and why. I think some of these “orphan trees” were created by me as @mscheffler suggested, just to save them for later. Little did I know . . . Some are 50 people and under, all the way down to 1 person, clearly an “unlink” situation. Thankfully I don’t have a huge DB to sort through. Thanks all, @kfunk, @thejerrybryan, @kbens0n and @mscheffler for your help. - Marti
There is a second way you could have created a ‘broken branch’ in the database.
Go to an old person and click on an empty box beyond the ones that are Add a Father/Mother. With one of these boxes highlighted pull down Add > Individual
and this is the start of a new broken branch, count of 1.
\s\Rick
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Again the unconnected trees do no harm in one’s database. They are just sitting there. I do occasionally peruse the larger of them occasionally so as to link them to the primary database should I find a basis for making the connection that eluded me originally.
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@mscheffler The trees I have reconnected to the main had one link missing; when I found it, they were reconnected immediately. I also found that there are individuals in the tree without any information at all. They are only a name. I must work on that. It is interesting that the majority of broken links are in my Purdy line going back to early 1700s New York That was the early years of my research - before genealogy websites.
I have found that when I have single names with no information, that this likely came about as a data entry error. Something as simple as a cat jumping on the keyboard can cause a “save” of something I had not intended. I usually just delete blank names when I see them as there is no information to make a proper link. I do keep singles with information as some day I may find them to connect to one of my single surname projects I keep within my main RM database…
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@mscheffler I am doing the same thing - no point in saving just a name with nothing more. If I’m lucky, tho. there is a note, or source attached and those will give me clues. Right now I’m trying to undo a merge I just did from the “Tree list” with a person from the main tree, only to realize they are different men, who were about the same age, and married women with the same first name. Ugh. I know the parents of one; not sure of the parents of the second. ADDED: They are both still in the tree and have the same RIN but one has a blue Plus mark before his name.
Because they have been merged, they are not actually both still in the tree. Where there were two men in the tree, there is now only one man in the tree. The Plus mark name is an Alternate name for the one remaining man.
You will need to do something like the following to fix this.
- Add a new man with the same name as the first man’s Alternate Name as a second man. The second man should have an appropriate birth date. The first man may still have two birth facts that you can use as a guide for the new man’s birth date.
- Delete the Alternate Name from the first man.
- If the first man has two birth Facts, delete the Birth fact that doesn’t belong.
- Link the second man’s wife to the second man as spouse. Unlink the second man’s wife from the first man as spouse.
- Assuming the first man is the one with the known parents, you would be done with parents. Otherwise, Unlink the first man from the parents and Unlink the second man to the correct parents.
- You may or may not have sources to fix, but that’s too complicated to describe without knowing what sources you have for each of the two men.
- You may or may not have media to fix, but that’s too complicated to describe without knowing what media you have for each of the two men.
I may have forgotten some little detail, but I think that’s most of it.
Of course, secret option #3 would be to restore from a backup made before the two men were merged, provided you have such a backup and provided that you haven’t made any other changes to your database since you merged the two men together.
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@thejerrybryan Thanks Jerry, for your instructions. I knew the +person was an alternate, but his profile has information the other doesn’t. Anyway, I know I must recreate the deleted guy; I just didn’t know what steps to take and in what order. I am thankful you have provided those instructions. I am also gathering more sources so I can hopefully keep someone from making the same mistake I did with regard to these two fellas. Wish me luck - Thanks again! - Marti
Whew! Got it all back together. One David connected to father; sadly the other is still a hangnail. But he can hang out in the DB until I find out who he is. Thanks @thejerrybryan for guiding me through the restoration process. Regards - Marti