How do I delete the 2 and 3 child lines here?
While the blank child is selected (highlighted in blue)… right-click anywhere upon the blue and select Unlink>From Parents
Run all the database tools under File.
I did this several times, and it did not work.
I already did all of those database tools except the compact one which was taking a very very long time, so I quit as I was not sure if it would work because the other tools said all was ok.
When I try to delete it as you suggested, I get an error message saying I must highlight the person to delete it. As you can see from the screen shot, there is no name there. Just the sex. I made up a name, and it did not work.
Go to settings and under the gear, you will see number to display-- select RIN and then go to see if these blanks have a RIN #
@kahill1918 and let us know what you find
When you highlight and click what? That message appears when you Click File → Tools → Delete in order to delete a database. You aren’t going to be seeing that if you are trying to a person.
That is to “permanently” remove data base – you would lose everything not backed up.
That is NOT what you want to do
You won’t be able to delete a phantom child which this seems to be. If they are a real person without a name, double clicking on them would open their Edit Person screen. Delete, Person is under the Edit menu. If you use the Delete under File it will delete the whole database. On the Edit menu you will also find the unlink options. You can unlink the family members and add them back again using select existing person.
This is the problem. The phantom children are not real and do not exist. For instance,in the example I provided here, Francis is the only child. Yet on the family screen, there are #2 and #3 are there and have no names but they are male. They should not be there at all because they do not exist. Now suppose I find that Francis does have a brother after all. So I try to add him, and he comes out at #4 child on the family when he should be #2.
It does not matter how hard I try to delete #2 and #3, they won’t go away. I even tried to key in fake names, but they won’t show up. The #2 and #3 remain blank except for the sex.
I even created a new file, dragged, and dropped that branch onto the new file, and #2 is still there but #3 finally disappeared.
Karen
Correct, you cannot delete phantom children because they don’t really exist. You need to unlink everyone in the family. Unlink the first real child from the parents, then the father from mother. Save the marriage information because you will probably need to add it back again.
I would be intersted to know how the problem arose, if you can remember.
I highlighted a problem some time ago whereby adding two or more children with the same name from Ancestry to RM via Treeshare gives rise to exactly this problem. (It only happens if you try to add the two children in the same update operation from the record for one or other parent.)
The first child is added properly; the second child is not added. The system either creates a dummy record as in the example you have shown or adds a random person from the database to the family.
To add a new person and simulataneously place them in a family, the system creates an entry in a the person table for the new person and puts an entry in the child table liking the id number of the family with the id number of the new person.
What happens with the treeshare problem is that it fails to create an entry in the person table and adds an entry in the child table, properly identifying the family but adding a random id number for the child. If this random number corresponds to an existing person, then that person is added to the family. Otherwise, a phantom record is created.
I have tried to avoid duplicating this problem in my database by changing my process for updating people, so it is some time since I came across it in live. My recollection (just confirmed on a test database) is that @rzamor1 has the right approach (not surprisingly; she usually does); you should essentially delete the whole family by unlinking all the children from the parents and the mother from the father. I would then run the ‘phantom records’ tool and finally recreate the family.
It would be very useful if RM could both, a) fix the underlying problems that give rise to corrupt data like this (such as that identified in Treeshare) and b) add a fix to the problem to the integrity check and similar tools. It is not too hard to run a query to delete records from the child table where the id number of the child does not exist in the person table.