Example of a child unlinking problem

Here is a quintessential example of an unlinking problem I have encountered several times today. It’s from some data that I imported via GEDCOM from another family member back in the 1990’s when I was using Family Origins, predecessor to RM. I figured out how to do the unlinking, but it took me a few minutes. It ought to be much easier to do. Please consider this as a tip on how to do this kind of unlinking and a request to the developers to please make this kind of unlinking much easier to accomplish.

Here is the start point of the difficulty.

I have John R. Molyneux person 7715 linked twice to his father with an unknown mother both times. The first unknown mother is an actual person - namely person 13815. She has one fact, namely her date of marriage to person 7716. I do not know why we don’t have her name, and I shall strive to get it. The second unknown mother is labelled as Unknown spouse. But she is not really an unknown spouse. She is really a non-existent spouse. She has no record number and she is not stored in the RM database.

The only thing I need to do to fix this problem is to unlink John R. Molyneux person 7715 from the family with his non-existent mother. It is curiously difficult to do. None of the following work.

Highlight the second instance of person 7715, the instance with the non-existent mother. Right click and try to Unlink > Unlink from parents. Instead of being offered to unlink him from the family where he is highlighted, I am offered instead to unlink him from his other family where the mother is a real but unknown person.

The standard advice in this kind of unlinking is to get the child and parents where the unlinking needs to take place into Family View. So I highlight person 7715 as before with his second family, the one with the nonexistent mother. Then I switch to Family View. However, it places the screen in Family View with the real but unknown mother listed rather than the non-existent mother. Our person 7715 is in the parent position rather than the child position, but you can see the mother who is person 13815 in the grandparent position rather than the non-existent person being in the grandparent position.

As a third try, I try clicking on the person 7715 with the non-existent mother in the Family tab in the sidebar who is clearly visible. When I do so, nothing happens.

So finally, I expand the top half of the side bar and click on the Parents tab. At this point, I can see the family that I need to use, but I still can’t see the children.

So now I click on Children to expand the children list

And after clicking on person 7715 one last time, I finally have him in Family View with his nonexistent mother so I can unlink him. Unlinking him at this point via right click Unlink > unlink from parents does work correctly, so I won’t bother showing it. I do realize that RM is designed to go the the tabs at the top of the sidebar as the first thing to try rather than the last thing to try. But the process is extremely non-intuitive. And it remains non-intuitive, even after you get to the tabs in top of the sidebar. Among other things, I always have to expand the top half of the sidebar to make enough room to see what is going on and the children list does not expand automatically. Surely there is a way to make this process easier to accomplish and more intuitive.

P. S. I decided to try one more thing before submitting this message. I tried right clicking the father (person 1368) with both the Unlink > unlink from spouse option and the Unlink < unlink family members option. If either of these options had worked, it would have made the whole process very simple and I might have cancelled this message without sending it. But neither option worked. It would only offer me the family with the spouse that exists and not the family with the spouse who doesn’t exist. So what actually worked after all the shenanigans to coerce the non-existent spouse onto the screen in Family View was to right click person 7715 and Unlink > unlink from Parents.

Given all the trouble I had with this, it’s no wonder that a common piece of advice is first to add a dummy person as the spouse rather than doing the Unlink with a non-existent person as a spouse. If you do that, then everything does work much more smoothly. The dummy spouse has to be deleted, of course. But I wonder why it can’t just work the same with a non-existent spouse as it does with a dummy spouse. That one change would make all of these unlinking problems ever so much easier to solve.

P.P.S. This is a problem that was not any easier to deal with in RM7. RM8/9/10 unlinking works just like RM7. It was a difficult process in RM7 and it remains difficult in RM8/9/10.

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something I have not encountered often but you raise a good point/issue— it should be easier and yes I have to add dummy person as that seem easier cleaner even if stupid way to correct.

Holy Cow Batman!

I would have thought that running the Tools would have gotten rid of the “non-existent” spouse.

I also wonder if D&D into another empty database would have removed the “non-extent” spouse.

I vaguely recall having a “non-existing” person a million years ago and I might have gotten rid of it by the D&D method.

Neither of those tools could possibly work for this particular situation. The non-existent spouse is not a so-called phantom person. Running the tools or running D&D usually gets rid of a phantom person. Rather, the non-existent spouse an empty slot in RM’s FamilyTable. It’s a placeholder if you will. You can’t get rid of the non-existent spouse except by getting rid of the family’s entry in FamilyTable or by adding a spouse to make the non-existent spouse to exist.

An entry in RM’s FamilyTable represents, well, a family. It has two slots, one for the father and one for the mother. One or the other of the slots can be empty, but both cannot be empty. You have an empty slot if either the father or mother is not entered.

There are no children in the FamilyTable. Rather, each child has an entry in RM’s ChildTable. Each entry in the ChildTable links to an family in the FamilyTable. There has to be an family in the FamilyTable to which the ChildTable can link if there is a child in the ChildTable. There is a child in this case.that was linked to a family with a real person for the father and with an empty slot for the mother.

So an unlink for a child/parent relationship first deletes the entry for the child in the ChildTable. In many cases, that’s all it does. But if the result is a family in FamilyTable with no other children who are linked in and if there is only one slot which is filled in the FamilyTable, then the family in the FamilyTable is also deleted. Otherwise, the family still has a spouse and/or more children, so the family in the FamilyTable cannot be deleted.

In my case, there were no other children and there was an empty slot in the FamilyTable. So a side effect of unlinking the child from the second family was to delete the second family. This was a desired outcome, but it was not the primary goal.

Remember that my goal was not to get rid of the non-existent spouse per se. A non-existent spouse can be a necessary and desirable item in an RM database if only one spouse is known. Rather the problem is that the child was linked to two different families, both of which had the same father and both of which had an unknown mother. So my goal was to have the child end up linked to only one family rather than to two. One of the unknown mothers was an empty slot. The other unknown mother was a real person with the name of “unknown” and who had a Marriage fact. So I wanted to unlink the child from the family with the empty slot in the FamilyTable as the way to get rid of the double linkage.

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Jerry–I have always told people to give the unknown spouse a dummy name and go to the screen where the child is listed under the parents in family view as it is easier to accomplish–if the 2nd unknown mother has a number, you have to give her a dummy name if you want to delete her after unlinking from child…
That said ( and I have tried it several times) when I highlight my child Joe Sky # 263 in the descendant view under unknown spouse–no number


then switch to family view–it shows the unknown no number mother and I am able to unlink the child from his parents

have no idea why my results are different than yours…

So maybe the problem is not the non-existent spouse, but the problem is still there. Here is another example, Raymond Daugherty person 32620 who has a non-existent mother and also a real mother Martha Duncan person 33454. This is another family I imported from another researcher back in the 1990’s and I’m just now cleaning up.

In this case, the non-existent mother appears first and the real mother of Martha Duncan person 33454 appears second. No matter which Raymond Daugherty person 32620 I highlight, I get the non-existent mother when I switch to Family View. I can’t get the real mother just by highlighting the correct version of the child and switching to Family View.

Except that there is a difference. I actually can get the result I want very easily this time by highlighting the real mother in Descendant View and then switching to Family View. So in that sense, having a real parent vs. having a non-existent parent does make a huge difference. You can highlight a real parent but you can’t highlight a non-existent parent.

P.S. (and this is the real kicker). Having gotten to the real mother, I can no longer get back the non-existent mother to get rid of her by doing an Unlink, except by the long and convoluted process I described at the beginning of this thread. In that sense, a non-existent mother or a non-existent father is still a very annoying navigation problem.

Jerry-- I think the difference between your results and mine is that you are trying to navigate using the Family INDEX view where as I use the spouses / parents under the person’s name to change views

of course then I MIGHT not see all the siblings of the person BUT can scroll down or j use arrow next to parents

As I described, if I use the spouses Tab or the Parents in the Info panel at the top of the side panel, I can get it to work. That is exactly what you are describing.

My first preference is that it would work just by highlighting in the main view (Descendant View, in my case) and then changing to Family View. That doesn’t work.

My second preference is that it would work just by clicking in the Family tab at the bottom of the side panel. That doesn’t work.

Those two techniques do work most of the time for most of the navigation I do between close family members. They just don’t work in the situations I’m describing.

Descendant View can only look at the first incident they appear on the list. If a person is linked to more than one set of parents then its best to display the correct set in the Family View. In the sidebar the only way to unlink is in the Info box, Parent or Spouse tabs. That would be the person highlighted in the main view. The Family tab at the bottom of the sidebar can’t move a person into the primary position until you click on the arrow to the right.