New RM users frequently have trouble unlinking children from one set of parents and relinking them to a different set of parents. Well, experienced RM users can have the same problem. Here is a real example.
I have a man named Ernest Lewis Braden in my database where the list of his children came originally from his obituary. At the time, I didn’t know the name or names of the mother or mothers of the children. I created a placeholder mother for all the children. There is always a question of whether to create a placeholder mother as a real person, or whether to leave the slot for the mother empty. In this case, I created a placeholder mother.
I then found the names for two wives, but still didn’t know which wife went with which children. I have now found the mother for one of the children, namely the mother for Charles Allen Braden was Ethel Mae Hensley. So I am moving Charles Allen Braden from the placeholder to his real mother. The first step was to do an Add Parents for the father with the correct mother. The workflow for that step is very awkward and confusing, but it’s very manageable for an experienced RM user. Here is the status of the family after that step. So far, so good.
So now I right click the Charles Allen Braden who is linked to the placeholder wife and choose the Unlink > From Parents option. You can see him highlighted in the screen capture above. But it offers me the opportunity to unlink him from Hazel Katherine Taylor, to whom he is not linked at all. Sometimes in these kinds of dialogs you can say No and it will then take you to the next spouse. But in this case, the only options are to say Yes or to cancel out of the workflow entirely. Surely there is a better way and the workflow I was trying to accomplish should have worked.
I do know that a recommended way to do this is to go to Family View, and that does work. But it seems like the way I was trying to do should have worked as well. And now I only have six more children to go to find the correct mother!
*EDIT to add that this is definitely a programming oversight.
This appears to somehow be related to the purpose and associated display hierarchy for this Tab “view” (descending). My guess is that right-clicking the target parent (to be detached from) for folks with two or more linked Mothers/Fathers and then selecting Position>Move to primary position will facilitate the subsequent Unlink from the intended parent.
I think its clearer and easier to work from the Life Summary tab. Add child is under each spouse. Unlink is on the 3 dot menu next to the child’s name. If they are linked to both sets of parents select the one where you want to remove the link.
I suspect you prefer to work a lot in the descendant view (depending on what you are doing )
And I am not quite sure why it not as smooth as one might think/hope
I had forgotten about that feature of the Life Summary tab, even though that’s the tab I use nearly all the time in the sidebar.. After years of doing Unlinks the other way, I guess old habits die hard. You are correct that the Unlink works very smoothly from the Life Summary tab. It still seems to me that it should work just as smoothly from the Descendant View. Plus, I don’t think you can do the Relink from the Life Summary tab.
I spend nearly all of my time now in Descendant View and People View. People View is my index and my filter and my live “custom report” with the columns. Unlike the sidebar Index, People View still tracks right along with the other main views. Well, it can’t track the other views when it is being prevented by a filter, but that’s a very minor issue.
I switched to Descendant View from Family VIew as my main view after RM8 came out because the RM8 (and now RM11) Family View simply doesn’t meet my needs. If I hadn’t switched from Family View to Descendant View, I would probably still be on RM7. That’s how poorly the new Family View meets my needs.
I keep Descendant View set to 2 generations most of the time, and occasionally go to 3 generations. But it’s very hard to use for any more generations than that. I’m still bothered that the new Descendant View doesn’t indent spouses the same way as RM7, so that spouses in RM11’s Descendant View are very easy sometimes to confuse with siblings. And I would practically kill sometimes to be able to add a generation of children to Descendant View without having to add the spouses to the next generation. It needs to be an option to be able to do it either way. But I can work with Descendant View, and I really can’t work with the new Family View.
