Have you stumbled across a situation where two people are merged incorrectly in your family tree?
Today we're going to walk through how to fix bad merges on the FamilySearch family tree.
how do they happen? The first thing that happens is that users of FamilySearch are doing very,
very shallow research. they may only be looking at a parish record in England that said Richard
Richard married Mary Tripp and they had a child named William. Well, did, you know, that there
are quite a few Richard Richards? And a number of them married Marys. And they had sons named
William. And if you don't go and look at lots of other records such as census, enumeration records,
baptismal records, death records and other things from this parish. you're gonna confuse people.
so a lot of the problems that you're gonna find on your tree being all messed up is
because people didn't do deep enough research. and that is also related to the fact that
people with the same name get combined together. often I have an ancestor who people think
the name is original Dorothy Zumstein . I have another Effingham Townley. there are
multiple people with that name living about the same time period. if you don't look at
other identifying pieces of information, you're going to tangle up the tree.
so how do we go about fixing bad merges. so I talked to my colleagues over at FamilySearch
and they wanted to make sure that I explain this before I teach you how to use the unmerged tool.
because we don't want you to make mistakes that other researchers or yourself will regret later.
so let's make sure you understand these things. and then we will hop over to the family tree to
show you how to actually put this into action. the first thing you need to know about a merge
that you want to break is. what happened when the merge was created? So you have Sally 1 and she has
some facts and sources. and then there is Sally 2 who has some facts and sources. and somewhere
along the way someone said these two Sally's are the same person. so a merge took place. and when
that merge took place you have Sally 1 that has the facts from both Sally 1 and Sally 2. but Sally
2, she's not deleted. she hasn't disappeared. she's just disconnected from everything else.
because what happens later if you decide, oh Sally 1 and Sally 2 really are two separate
people and I need to split them. the beauty is if you have recently created this merge,
or you've made no changes to Sally 1 since that merge, you can easily hit and unmerge and separate
the two people. Sally 1 will retain her sources and Sally 2 will retain her sources. but what
happens if after you merged Sally 1 and Sally 2 together and you added more sources to Sally 1
but now you need to split Sally 2 off? What happens then? Well, FamilySearch
can split off the original sources that went with Sally 2 that you had migrated into the merge.
those are going to go back. no problem with a click of a button. but those the blue facts,
the new facts that you found after that merge or other researchers have found after that merge,
FamilySearch doesn't know who it goes to. so it just keeps them with the person
that had survived the merge. if you need any of those facts and sources to go over to Sally 2,
because they actually belong to her. then you're going to have to detach those facts and sources
from Sally 1 and put them over on Sally 2. so let's go to the computer and show you
how to unmerge two individuals. this is Dorothy Ann Zumstein. and I know her because she is my
grandmother's sister. so my great-aunt. as I scroll down the profile I see some of the facts
that I know about her because. I've done quite a bit of research for her. I know that these are her
parents this is my Professor Zumstein that taught at Ohio State University, Michigan, you know,
University of Michigan and the University of Iowa. but it wasn't called that back then.
If you know what the University of Iowa was called in the 1920s, let me know in the
comments. that'll be a fun challengein any case all of this checks out. big check mark right.
and these are her children. they're hidden now. these folks are in my private space so
I can actually see them. um. this one right here is deceased. so anybody can actually see him. um.
but these two are deceased so everybody can see them as. Well, in any case all of this checks out.
what doesn't check out is this Richard Zieman. and not only does it not check out, but she is married
to both men at the same time. there are some stories about Dorothy but that's not one of them.
so what I'm gonna do is. I'm gonna do a little bit of an investigative research.
and I'm going to go to last changes- show all. and what I'm looking for is
something like this. there's a surviving person a deleted person. and this option to unmerge. and
sometimes it said restore. either one works. and I also want to see when it happened and who did
it. now this is just a training video, so yes, I'm the one who messed it up. and that's okay.
and sometimes you're gonna mess it up and you're gonna need to fix it. and FamilySearch makes that
possible for you. no problem. before we continue I want to personally invite you to our live streams,
they happen every other Friday be sure to check the channel page of Family History Fanatics to
make, find out when we have the next live stream. or sign up for our newsletter so you'll never miss
another episode or when we go live. so what you now want to do is think. okay. so how did this
go wrong? When I start looking at some sources there is this problematic one.
view source. Dorothy is immigrating through Vermont, United States.
when I looked at the original profile for this Dorothy Ann Zumstein she was
in Vermont. and she does have a child who's deceased. but all of this. what's happening
with her is based on that Vermont immigration record. so somebody came along over on this
Dorothy's profile, saw that immigration record and said, "Oh, that was for my relative."
Shallow Research because there are no other sources on this profile. none. but when you
actually look at the immigration record you're going to see some of those details that pertain
to my family. so we have a Dorothy Ann Zumstein. she's six weeks old from Wellenport, Ontario,
Canada. she is going to Ann Arbor, Michigan. now you know why I told you about my grandfather at
the beginning. he taught at Michigan- University of Michigan. which is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. for
those of you who don't actually, don't know. and that's okay. we have an international audience.
but the father's name is Robert Zumstein and his address in, um,
Ann Arbor. and they were visiting Robert Zumstein of Wellandport in Ontario. Well, if we go back
to this tree. you would see that Dorothy, Robert Victor, and if we go to Robert Victor. we're going
to see that his father's name is Robert Walter. and Robert Walters from Wellandport. so now I
need to unmerge. why did I go through all of that instead of just go straight into how to unmerge?
Well, because the FamilySearch family tree is a working tree. people are peer reviewing
each other's research. and if you don't know much about peer reviewing I have some links in the
description that you're going to want to check out from my blog about peer reviewing in genealogy.
we need. if we think something's wrong we need to try to figure out where the mistake was made.
because then when we actually unmerge we need to tell everybody else who's using FamilySearch
why we are making those changes. if you're not willing to tell people why you're making changes,
then don't go unmerging people. I would say just tell people why you made the changes. now we know
this merge was improper. we're going to go ahead and walk through the process of unmerging them and
FamilySearches actually made this relatively easy. over here in the last changes column
or a box we're going to go back to the change source list or the change list. and notice
there's this little box. it could say restore or unmerge. whichever is more appropriate in your
native language, you click on that and now it's going to show you there was the surviving Dorothy
is the one that we show online. and on the left is the person that was deleted. and really
not. she's not showing up in search. she's just been combined with Dorothy, the one
that survived. but we want them to separate. so what we're gonna do is we're going to leave
a reason this should be unmerged. something better than there was a little information.
so what I did in my notepad is I wrote something based on the census records, immigration records,
and personal accounts from Dorothy Ann Zumstein- the one that survived. in her PID number right
there, she married Howard Merritt and is the daughter of Robert Victor Zumstein. She never
married Richard Zeeman which is the one that's connected with this profile. there is evidence
that Richard did marry a Dorothy Zumstein and had a daughter, but his wife is different from the one
who married Howard Merritt. that's good enough. if you have other suggestions on how to make it
more clear. but that's the great thing about FamilySearch is we can constantly go back and
strengthen our statements. but that's good enough for now. and I click unmerge and when I'm done
I will have the change log. and it will say unmerge in my version of Dorothy and it will have
that nice reason statement of why the the unmerged was correct. and then this Dorothy is restored and
people can start adding sources and documentation for her. I hope this video helps, you know, how to
unmerge individuals. if you find out you have to re-merge them again, the process is simple. make
sure you check out my video about how to merge people together right up there. and if you want
more tips and tricks on using FamilySearch be sure to check out this playlist right here.
Have you stumbled upon.