Problem deleting 2nd spouse

miles · Post by **miles** » 05 Nov 2005 21:31

I find that I have made a mistake and need to delete a second wife. I selected the record and deleted but was left with the 2nd wife tab saying 'no spouse' instead of being blank as I expected. This also means that a blank box appears containing a question mark in the chart where the 2nd wife would normally be. I then tried to unlink the 2nd wife before deleting, but with the same result. Then I tried to unlink and then to link to another (the correct) individual in the file. This caused mayhem - first the program froze and I had no alternative but to press the restart button. When I reopened FH, it could not find my file. I checked in Windows Explorer and to my dismay the file had been DELETED! Fortunately I was able to restore from my backup which is on a keydrive, but had that failed, it might have been disaster. How could this have happened I wonder and how can I ever remove completely this 2nd spouse?? Any ideas?

ID:1134

YouTube · Post by **Jane** » 05 Nov 2005 23:38

I have never heard of any problems with deleting a spouse, all you normally need to do is to select the family as spouse section on the records windows or all tab and press delete.

I would recommend running a File Validate from the File menu to ensure there are no problems brought in from an imported file.

Tombaston · Post by **Tombaston** » 06 Nov 2005 09:42

To avoid disaster make sure you have Prompt for backups selected on the Backup tab under Tools, Preferences. I let FH create a backup any time I use it, then occasionally I prune them back to one per month for the past year and one per year before that. I would also recommend doing a regular backup of all your data to a CD or DVD.

paulf · Post by **paulf** » 08 Nov 2005 16:26

I spent much time trying to do the same - delete a mistakenly entered 2nd spouse - until Jane advised me to delete the entry under the 'all' tab in the Property Diagram. Worked first time!

Post by **Guest** » 09 Nov 2005 13:22

Many thanks for the help from Jane, Dave and Paul. I tried deleting from the records window but that left a link to a now unnamed spouse. I have now removed that link using the All tabe and all is now well again as the deleted 2nd spouse does not show up either in the properties box or in the diagram, but I suspect that the program still has the record of an unnamed 2nd spouse, but as there is no link to the entry, there is no longer a problem. I do back up frequently to a key drive and on exit from the program which avoided any loss of data, but the crash which I had still puzzles me - I guess that somehow I ran out of memory and maybe got into some sort of loop!

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