I recently automerged duplicates and then when I went to sync with ancestry it didn’t give me the option to sync the merged people as changes only to delete the redundancies. What happened to these merges? I dont remember their names so I cant check on ancestry.
Automerge doesn’t really provide you a record of who was merged. Automerge won’t do the merge unless the two people being merged are pretty much identical. So one way to think about what AutoMerge is doing is that it is deleting the redundancies in your RM database for you.
So it seems to me that after the AutoMerge in RM you could use RM to identify those redundancies in Ancestry for you so you can delete them. So you sort of have a record of what AutoMerge did by comparing your RM database with your Ancestry tree. If they are real redundancies, then deleting the redundancies in Ancestry should amount to the same thing as merging the redundancies .
There are a couple of possible gotchas to look out for. One possible gotcha is that “pretty much identical” may not be the same as “exactly identical”. For that reason, I very seldom use AutoMerge and I do all my merges manually. The other is that I don’t know for sure how AutoMerge handles relationships - parents, spouses, and children. For example, I think that if a man has a wife and children and another man with identical name, sources, facts, and media files has no wife and children that the result of the Automerge is that merged person will still have the wife and children. But I’m a little fuzzy right now about how AutoMerge handles that situation. Those are the kinds of issues that persuade me to do manual merges instead of AutoMerge.
Unfortunately manual merges on RM9 also don’t trigger a ‘changed’ marker in Treeshare. Of course, the user is more likely to know who has been merged, but even so I think that not creating a ‘changed’ marker for Treeshare is a bug for both automatic and manual merges and should be fixed.
Alan
In the People List view be sure to add the column “Date edited.” You can sort by this column to see who you worked with on that day.
You can also filter on date edited, for example to see only persons who were edited on or after a particular date.
But be aware that the date edited field is not a panacea. It can be updated when nothing about a person has changed, and it can fail to be updated when something about a person actually has changed. I have some considerable sympathy with the developers over this problem. It can be much harder than it seems to define what it actually means for something about a person to have been changed.
Thanks both for these comments. I have added the ‘Date edited’ field, and understand and agree with your comments. However I can’t work out how to filter on ‘date edited’, unless this is in an advanced search.
Is there some way of doing this directly in the People List view?
Alan
There is no way to do the filtering directly in People List view.
Sorry for using the word “filtering” in this context without further clarification of what it means. Any filtering of People List view requires first making a group. So if you want to filter People List view to show only descendants of John Doe, then you first need to make a group of the descendants of John Doe. If you want to filter People List view to show only persons who were edited after 1 Jun 2023, then you first need to make a group of people who were edited after 1 Jun 2023.
To filter on a group in People List view, click on the box that says “Show Everyone”. There will be a dropdown which lists all your groups. The same filtering by group is available in lots of other places in RM as well.
If you have not yet made a group, you can probably work out how to do it fairly easily. If you run into any trouble,let us know.
When you do an Advanced Search, one of the many things you can search on is date last edited. The way RM9’s Advanced Search works is that it makes sort of a temporary and unnamed group. But the list of persons produced by Advanced Search cannot be used for filtering in the same way that a list of persons in a group can be used for filtering. So the answer to your question is “no”, Advanced Search cannot be used for filtering People List view.
The dialog for Advanced Search and the dialog for selecting people for a group are very similar. However, The dialog for making groups has a feature that is much more powerful than is the dialog for Advanced Search. Namely, the dialog for making groups supports such things as “ancestors of” and “descendants of” and several other similar criteria. And not only can you make a group of Descendants of John Doe, you can make a group of Descendants of John Doe who were born before 1900 or Descendants of John Doe who have been edited since 1 Jun 2023.
RM9 has a fresh new feature where the criteria for creating a group can now be saved. When making a new group, you can now choose to make a Free-Form group where the criteria are not saved or a Saved Criteria group where the criteria actually are saved. Unfortunately, the Saved Criteria groups do not support the more advanced features of Free_Form groups such as Descendants of John Doe.
If your only criterion is something like Edited After 1 Jun 2023, you might wish to consider making your group into a Saved Criteria group. That way, if you edit some additional persons, you could refresh the group and the newly edited persons would be added to the group automatically. Persons are never added to a Free-Form group automatically, even if the persons now satisfy the original group criteria. You can apply the original criteria manually to a Free Form group to refresh it. But the process is completely manual including that you would need to type in the criteria again.
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Many thanks @thejerrybryan for taking the trouble to explain this in such detail. I had not really noticed the saved criteria groups functionality and had certainly not appreciated its power.
This is a great help.
Alan