I am running RM9 on Win 10 with latest versions of both.
My research finds a couple Tom Jones and Mary Smith who I suspect may be the parents of Joe Jones, a person already in my main family tree.
Being unsure, I enter the details for Tom and Mary - births, death and marriage dates and places etc…
They are then a separate tree unconnected to my main family tree.
Later I verify that they are indeed the parents of Joe.
How then should I connect them to Joe?
I tried adding Tom as Joe’s father and then Mary as Joe’s mother.
That produced strange results - duplicated spouses and missing facts about the couple.
I suspect there is a correct way to add them. Apart from entering the data again.
Suggestions appreciated please.
G.
Indeed. The problem was surely in adding the father and mother separately.
You first need to cleanup. If you have a super current backup, you could just restore it. Otherwise, right click Joe and Unlink him from his parents. Depending on your exact situation, you may need to Unlink him from his parents more than once until all his parents are unlinked. What it amounts to is that you may need to Unlink Joe from his parent Joe and Unlink Joe from his parent Mary as two separate operations.
Again depending on your exact situation, there may be additional cleanup required. Namely, it’s possible that Tom and Mary are linked together as spouses more than once at this point. I hope that’s not true. That’s because if it’s true, you will need to Unlink the extra spouse links without disturbing the original spouse link. And in particular, you will need to Unlink the spouse link that doesn’t have a Marriage fact rather than the spouse link that does have a Marriage fact. I’m just going to hope for the time being you don’t have to worry about this problem. You can write back if you should encounter this problem.
We now come to the crux of the repair. Right click Joe and choose the Add Parents option. You will get to the Add Father option. Choose Select Existing Person and then select Tom. It will ask you if you wish to add Joe to the family of Tom and Mary which is what you are want to do. So click on Add and you are done. This works because you are adding Joe as a child to the family of Tom and Mary as a whole, You are not adding Joe as a child of Tom and then adding Joe as a child of Mary.
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Thank you for your interest and detailed explanation.
As it turns out I do have multiple backups in anticipation of trouble.
I have gone back to the ‘separate tree’ backup and done as you suggest - use the ‘add parents’ option.
It worked perfectly. Very much appreciated. I was unaware of that option. You live and learn.
Take care and stay well.
Pop.
I usually display the existing parents in the family view and add the existing child to them. Pretty quick and painless that way.
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That’s also a good way to do it, probably better then the right click and Add way of doing it that I suggested. No matter which way you do it, you have to remember to specify to Add an Existing Person rather than to Adding a New Person.
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It sounds like he had duplicate Tom Jones and Mary Smiths. Would a manual merge have worked to solve the problem?
Depends-- if he just added the names Tom and Mary as the parents-- then yes it MIGHT work as he had created 2 new people-- if however, when adding the names he used SELECT EXISTING PERSON to add Tom and Mary-- then no – that is why when you run across this type of problem, you need to check the RIN # for the person to see if they are a duplicate or the same person…