I often get cases when importing from family search where families are duplicated. In most cases it’s just the spousal relationship that is duplicated.
John Smith I001 and Jane Brown I002 with 3 children
John Smith I001 and Jane Brown I002 with 0 children
In these cases I just switch to the spouse with 0 children and unlink them.
In some cases both families have multiple children with some of the children being in both. Is there an easy way to just merge these together? The parents are identical.
It depends on what you mean by easy. But I think the answer is basically “no”.
In the simplest possible case that is similar to your situation, the parents are person #1 and person #2. Suppose they are linked twice as spouses. In one family, they have children who are person #3 and person #4. And suppose that in the other family, they have children #4 and children #5.
In this case, I would first go to the family with parents #1 and #2 and children #4 and #5 and unlink child #4 from the parents. Person #4 is still linked to the same parents in the family along with person #3. That’s the easy part.
I would then go to the family who has person #3 and #4 as children, and link in person #5 as a child.
Finally, I would go to the family who now has only person #5 as a child and unlink person #5 as the family. That completes the children, and the second family with person #1 and #2 as spouses no longer has any children. So unlink them as spouses, and you are done.
It’s easier to do than to describe, but it still can be tricky. I don’t think there is truly an “easy” way to handle all the cases.
I usually do this in Descendant View, but sometimes I find myself switching back and forth between Descendant View and Family View. I also usually find it convenient to have the tab at the bottom of the side panel set to Family tab.
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As @thejerrybryan its had to describe and easier to do but before you begin I would make note or screenshots before I began so you an know what to figure if you get lost.
Make sure you are using record #s, I think most of these errors for most use likely come over through use of treeshared (family search and/or ancestry) – if you are using nether than that would be more interesting how they came over.
That’s what I do as well. Fiddly process and easy to mess something up
This is such a common issue that I wish that RM had a “Merge Duplicate Families” tool. I think that creating such a tool would be possible, but the tool would need to deal with many nitty-gritty details.
The concept is that families in RM have an ID in the same way that people in RM have ID’s. What the tool would have to do would be to assign to assign just one family ID to what are two different family ID’s. For example, suppose the same John Doe and Jane Smith were linked together as spouses in family #12 and as spouses in family #42. You might have some people linked as children in family #12, some people linked as children in family #42, and possibly some children linked as children in both families. You would want family #12 to remain and family #42 to go away, or vice versa. You would want everyone who was in either family to start with to remain in the surviving family. And you would want all the children to be linked only once to the surviving family.
Also, you might start out where family #12 didn’t have a Marriage fact and where family #42 did have a Marriage fact or vice versa. The Merge Duplicate Families tool would need to be sure that such facts were still there after the merge. Also, things like media and citations can be attached to families. They would also still need to be there after the merge.
As I said, there would be a lot of nitty-gritty for such a tool to handle, but I think it would be possible
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This would be a lot of programming and user accepted risk. I go with the merging of persons in a single fashion and manner as this to where each persons to be merged is under the direct control of the data owner. If we were to have a ranking scenario, I would rank it low.