I have a person in my tree who shows as having a marriage which I cannot find anywhere else.
He and his wife have a genuine marriage in 1850, but the people screen shows a marriage in 1913.
I’ve tried running a report, but that only shows the 1850 marriage.
Is there any way to locate and delete this rogue marriage?
[Update] I’ve just found another one (presumably created courtesy of Ancestry), where the wife is the one with the rogue extra marriage. I’ll add the screenshots to the end.
That’s strange so I would delete the 2 marriages (1850 & 1860) THEN drag & drop the entire database into a new database and see if the “phantom” marriages follow.
If they DON’T show up, just add the correct marriages.
If they DO show up, do an Advanced Search for Event, Date, Contains and put in the dates (1 at a time). See if you can change the dates to the correct ones.
Thanks. That does seem to have removed the rogue marriages (although working how to use drag & drop was an interesting challenge).
Running the problem report got rid of 16 cases, but has identified 7 problems which hadn’t been identified on the original database, which is a bit bizarre - although I know at least one of those had been marked as Not A Problem (I don’t know how to identify if something was marked in this way).
Unfortunately it shows all things you have marked as not a problem, so your going to have to scroll down looking for marriages..
RM 8 thru RM 10 are the same except that they are under the wrench icon at top of page
Have you checked the Fact Type List to see if there is more than one Marriage event?
I’m less interested in the workarounds suggested than the cause of the anomaly in the Person’s Summary. Where is the system picking up the additional (in the first case, post-death) Marriage event in the Summary but not in Edit Person? I’m wondering if this is in some way related to an issue diagnosed some time ago which resulted in every “Unknown person” getting assigned the same name, in some of the outputs, not all. It stemmed from crashing of an “Add Person” process that resulted in a record in the NameTable for a PersonID=0 which is the value that triggers “Unknown person” in other outputs. You might try the Couple List and sort each column and inspect for heavily repeated names.
I did check the Fact Type List, and there is only one type of that name (I can’t believe that the system allows duplicates, TBH - it’s something I wouldn’t have allowed in my programming days).
I think it’s probably an Ancestry link issue - it wouldn’t be the first - but it’s hard to prove. One of the persons involved has an unknown spouse, but the other did not.
I’ll have a look at the couple list, just in case.
On merging sources and citations, you need to merge duplicate sources first and then merge duplicate citations. If you do it on the other order, no harm is done to your database. It just won’t merge everything that needs to be merged.
The problem with merging citations that shouldn’t be merged usually arises from citations that have been downloaded from Ancestry. It is sometimes the case that citations downloaded from Ancestry that are different differ only in that their media files or their Web tags are different. RM’s Merge All Duplicate Citations tool does not take these differences into account, and I think it should.
In theory, RM fixed this problem by making a change not to merge citations that have a blank citation name. Again in theory, citations downloaded from Ancestry that differ only in their media files or their Web tags will have a blank citation name. But I think it would have been much better to have tested the media files and Web tags instead.
This business of merging duplicate sources and especially duplicate citations is a really important issue. When you import from RM7 into any of RM8 through RM11, you will have duplicate citations. When you import from GEDCOM, you will have duplicate citations. When you download from Ancestry using TreeShare, you will have duplicate citations.
The duplicate citations have minimal adverse impact in your day to day use of RM. At its worst, it means that if you need to make a change to one of the duplicate citations, then you need to chase down each duplicate and make the change each place. That’s probably not a very common activity.
The real problem with duplicate citations is if you run reports with endnotes and if you use the option to merge duplicate endnotes. The option will not work unless you first merge all duplicate citations. So you run the Merge All Duplicate Citations tool, and the tool is not robust enough to detect citations that differ in their media files and Web tags. Your only hope is that citations that differ in their media files and Web tags have blank citation names.
Yes, I think these were almost all retrieved from Ancestry. They were driving me bonkers, but nearly as much as now when, in one case, I have 50+ certificates attached to each of the events, one for each person.
I can’t remember exactly what I did - it was several weeks later when I realised what had happened and far too late to restore the database. Since then I’ve been an ostrich hiding my head in the sand!
I’ll have to do a thorough investigation, although I’ve not got my head around the new reporting tools yet.
