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.
