Merge a person

[Michele B.]

Bonjour,
The second husband of a person was entered as a new person. I forgot how to merge him and his descendants so that he appears as a second husband of an existing person. Merci!

[Michael Talibard]

Click the + above the person and you will see a couple of ways of adding a new spouse—from the sidebar or using search.

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

Michael explains the way of adding a new spouse. I think her question was how to merge two people who are actually the same person. Here is how I do it.

1) unmark everyone in the file and then mark the two people that you want merged together.
2) set the right sidebar list to show marked people. There should only be two.
3) go to one of the marked people by clicking on him and simply drag the other one in the marked list to the one in the family view. Answer the questions to merge.

If there are children under both entries and Reunion wants to merge them along with the father that is being merged, don't do it. Even if the children names are exactly the same under both fathers, you will end up with scrambled eggs. Merge the duplicate children in the same way as you did the father, one pair at a time.

I remember a merge of fathers that I did once. One father entry had 5 children, the other had 1 child and that one child had exactly the same name as one of the children in the other list of 5. I thought "Oh, Reunion will get this right if I merge the children too. It should just merge the two children that have the same name." It didn't. I ended up with two or three children, one of which had three birth dates and assorted death and burial dates. Took time to get the dates and associated source citations sorted out into the proper five children.

[MarvinWelborn]

A GOOD question and reply here is: How to do the best, error-prone Merge.

I say this because, I have a database of about 50,000 plus individuals from over the years. Occasionally, after a Merge, I will find, due to multiple marriages & children, one (at worse more!) will go to “Yellow” or Unnamed status, and I can’t get them back into the family….I have to recreate the profile from scratch.

[Michele B.]

Grand merci Blaise! procédure très appréciée, and thanks for your comments about the children. Both entries had children.

[MarvinWelborn]

You're welcome, cousin Michèle
(I have Quebec ancestry going back to the 17th century)