I’ve identified that some of the persons transferred will be left with phantom parents. The phantom parents also will have phantom family-type events in the database, e.g., Marriage. These persons are likely spouses of descendants and had parents in the original database. Because the drag’n’drop was for descendants and their spouses, the parents of non-descendants were not to be transferred. However, the procedure did not completely delete their properties, leaving a trail of phantoms that manifest themselves subtly:
These are not the IED’s that I described in the above-mentioned topic (Insidious Explosive Data). I think they are harmless but puzzling and can be removed by running the database tool “Clean Phantom records”.
However, the phantom parents may serve some useful purpose such as tying together two siblings, both of whom having spouses who are descendants. That linkage is broken once the Clear Phantoms tool has been run. That tool may need to be run for other reasons and cannot make an exception for phantom parents.
Pre-RM10 drag’n’drop that relied on a background export-import via GEDCOM also leaves behind this phantom-parents residue.
This compares the before and after properties of a database that was created by RM10.0.5 drag’n’drop of a person with their Ancestors and Descendants and then operated on by the “Clean Phantom Records” database tool. Apart from the basic People total, only changed properties are listed.
Property
Before “Clean Phantoms”
After “Clean Phantoms”
Change
People
14083
14083
0
Families
5825
5766
-59
Families w/ 1 parent
248
189
-59
Events
53730
53692
-38
Events w/ no sources
18086
18084
-2
Citation Links
102730
102681
-49
Unused citations
0
49
-49
All 59 of the cleaned Family records were ones for which neither parent was identified - they are ghosts or phantoms indicating that there were identified parents in the source database that were not carried over.
“Families w/ 1 parent” is a misnomer because the “(view)” window also shows these phantom parents:
They are all grouped at the top of the list. Unfortunately, there is no convenient way to get from the list to the children in any other view and the print option does not even list the children. (@rzamor1 enhancement request).
An observation is that every one of these 59 phantom parents has more than one child suggesting that they are a by-product of the siblings being spouses of descendants. A couple of checks were consistent with that supposition.
Clean Phantoms not only deleted the phantom families (parents) but also the parents’ family-type events (Marriage et al) and the Citation links for those families or events. It left the Citations (now unused) and their Media intact.
The Couple List should give the same information. Sort on the Father or Mother column the single parents will sort to the top. The children can be viewed on the Family tab in the sidebar. Once you have a family highlighted you can move to them.
That does work. The Family View shows “+ Add Husband” and “+ Add Wife” as the parents with the known children below. Adding one of the parents does not increase the number of sets of parents in the sidebar and the revised couple sorts down in the Couple List. The Phantom Family events are inherited.
All looks good except that the resulting couple is listed twice in the Couple List. Both children show only the one set of parents. That artifact persisted on closing and reopening RM but I can find no cause for it in the database - there is only one record in the FamilyTable for the couple and it has the FamilyID that was created in the drag’n’drop.
I remember this same thing using PAF. If the parents are not included it would preserve the family with siblings. Running the database tools in RM will complete the removal of the family link between siblings if you do not want to add parents to that family.
