Family Historian User Group

I am digging my self a BIG BIG hole. I seem to have the same person in my project 3 times; I tried doing a merge with two records but that did not work well as I ended up with her being married three times not twice as it should be.

I tried manualy deleting and linking and ended up in a mess again - tried loading a backup and the program tried saving the backup in a different folder. I was unsure what was going to happen so stopped that and undid everything I had done instead.

I was then working with the data and everything looked wrong and this is where I found what I think is the third referance to the same person!

Any recomendations on how to proced ( I think I am back to where I started )?

ID:6198

Just merging two Individual records will often not resolve all the issues, since those Individuals may well have been linked to Family records.  In such cases, which are quite common, you will also need to merge two Family records.

Thanks for the tip Peter as the woman in question is in three different familys as well!

I will give it a go later - I had not seen the merge families part.

She has two different surnames as well as was married twice; but her maiden surname was the same as one of her marriage surnames!

A right old muddle.

You have to open the appropriate Records Window and select two Records to Merge Records of that type.

So for Families open the Families Records Window select two of them, and use Edit > Merge/Compare Records.

You may need to repeat for Sources, etc.

Not sure how your situation occurred but it sort of says AGAIN, that it would be nice, REALLY NICE, if FH 5 had the capability of asking 'is this the same John Jones that you already have in the file'.  It could save SO much unnessary duplication.
I've heard the reasons why some folks don't think this would be useful - and I understand that occasionally we DO get legitimate 'same names' - I get them also. Folks in same families; have named new child same as deceased child, etc. But I don't want to get back into a line and input the same data as I already have.
The little pop ups we are getting now re dates - have had a NUMBER of them - late marriage, etc. which were perfectly legitimate although unusual. That's nice also but not as useful to me as the duplicate name thing would be.
So, could we just revisit 'check for duplicate names' as a wish list request?

I only add a new Individual if he or she is a child, parent, or spouse of an existing Individual.  And I always do the add by dragging from the existing Individual's box on a suitable diagram.  As well as being a very convenient feature of FH, this method also makes it extremely unlikely that I would ever add a duplicate Individual.

Good advice peter and I have alot of people I have found but am not adding them until I can confim more details.

This one slipped through the net as she was a child of someone on the tree already; married and so changed her name remarried again with someone on the tree and the third time she was a parent of someone on the tree! Thats where I realised I had a problem.

I've added duplicates unsuspectingly loads of times - e.g. where distant cousins marry. It normally comes to light when I enter a census and the address pops up as already entered and I think 'oh, that's a coincidence' before realising it isn't.

Regarding the wishlist, there are three items (see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... pX2c#gid=0)
(56) (250) and (471).

Maybe as a stop gap a plugin could be written to test a number of optioned fields, e.g. first name, surname, life dates, places, spouse name etc. for duplicates.

I tend to check with the 'search all possible names' plugin at the moment.

I enhanced it the other day, so if you have a record selected on a diagram or the Focus window it prompts a search for that, or you could do a quick search before adding a new person.

One problem I have found in general is the married name and maiden name are different. I wanted to check for all first names without a surname but in the standard search box on individuals you have to put both Surname,Forename.

Are you using the 'search all possible names' plugin. I just tried it with my wife's first name only and got her plus the family record.

Also you only need to put in the first few letters e.g. if I was looking for William Michael, who could be Will Michell or Wm Michall I just put in W and Mic and get all possibilities.

I used the records window > individual records not a plugin. I thought you would either be able to leave the surname out or put a wildcard in.

There is now a prototype Work in Progress plugin that may help.

See Find Duplicate Individuals.

Ran for 3% - 10 seconds



Largish gedcom, 33,000 individuals. I'm doing a one name study so am going to have hundreds of duplicates.

I can upload the gedcom to my website and give you the url if you require.

Chris

I didn't see the other thread before I posted. I've added to that thread as I guess its not a good idea to have two threads on the same subject going