Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Partial Answer to the Merge Question in FamilySearch Family Tree

In doing some more investigation about my inability to merge two individuals in FamilySearch Family Tree, I found the following statement in the FamilySearch.org Help Center Document ID: 114163:
In preparation to migrate new FamilySearch data to the Family Tree database, the database team is un-combining the individuals that have the most duplicates in the new FamilySearch database.

This is manifesting itself as combined records suddenly being completely separated and creating duplicates. This is part of the work that is needed in order to prepare the data for Family Tree. This is not happening to all individuals who have been combined, just the ones with the largest number of duplicates.

We ask for your patience and understanding during this transitional period. Please do not re-combine these individuals yet, and give the database team some time to transition the data.
OK, so this essentially says to me, be patient. I will now do a search to see if there are any other duplicates I might find. If I do find some to merge I will report back in a future post. 

2 comments:

  1. One condition that prevents merge in FamilySearch Family Tree(FSFT) is if both records are tied to LDS Membership records. NewFamilySearch allows the user to request that the duplicate records be combined by an NFS Administrator, FSFT apparently does not have that capability.

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  2. James, you say "I will now do a search to see if there are any other duplicates I might find. If I do find some to merge I will report back in a future post."

    You cannot select "merge" candidates. If the underlying program does not choose individuals who you know are really duplicates, you have no option to add candidates.

    I hope this user-defined-duplicate option will be available soon.

    This is complicated by the search engine from FS-FT's still searching the new.FamilySearch database rather than the FS-FT database as modified by users. The announced "synchronization" between the two databases does not appear to be reflected in search engine results.

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