fixing my merge mistake

[RebeccaH]

I did a merge without backing up and understanding what I was doing. Now I need to fix it.

When I merged 2 mothers some of the offspring were assigned to the wrong parent. Other children just disappeared from the list completely along with one of the mother I had merged incorrectly.

Since I cannot undo my action, I think I will have to recreate the original parent, use the clipboard to move the child to the correct parents, then create a new file under the original correct parents going forward.

Are there any pitfalls to watch for? Is this the best way to approach fixing what I did? Any suggestions ?

[Blaise A. Darveaux]

First, get the marriages straightened out. Check to see if you have one mother who is incorrectly married to two fathers. If the two fathers are the same, then maybe that is where you have the missing children. Merging the two fathers who are the same will put all the children together. Read below for merging two people.

If the father's are, indeed, different and one of them should be with another mother, mark the father that you want to move, make the new mother. Put the marked father (set the right hand list to show marked people) with the mother. Then dissolve the incorrect marriage with the first mother by clicking on the downward pointed arrow in her box, choose spouses and children from the pull down list, select (I think) Edit Spouses. click on his name and press delete key.

Check to make sure that incorrect children didn't get merged together. That happened with me because the children's names had either Marie-xxxx if female and Joseph-xxxx of male. It couldn't distinguish the children from each other even though they all had unique middle names. If their data is all good, use clipboard to move them to proper parent couples. Of course, merge any that have duplicates. Here is how I merge two people: 1) mark both and make sure the names are exactly the same, 2)Show the two in the right hand list by displaying marked people only. 3) Go to one of them and drag the other onto it. You will get the standard merge window showing the big red arrows to the people being merged, then merge.

Hope this helps.

[kyuck]

If you have Time Machine you may be able to recover it from there.