Genealogy Chat

Hi, Thank goodness the list is growing of people who are being driven demented by not being able to delete individuals. To all members....this could be you at some point Can everyone who has been caught by this send off ASAP an e~mail to GR Help again, and maybe we can get them to have a look at the problem instead of sleeping on the job, and just binning sporadic complaints. Thanks, Jay

I have also made mistakes on my family tree ie:doubled the ancestor I now have the same person twice and cannot delete the second one. Im so annoyed it doesn,t look right I know they are trying to play safe but there must be another way to foolproof the system without deleting the origanal person.

The GR tree is not as sophisticated as software such as Family Tree Maker and does not allow orphan branches. All the names must be linked to another, and ultimately to you. This means that you can only delete a person that has only a single connection, otherwise you would break the link between any others attached to this person and the main tree, and they would simply float off into space. PC tree software allows for this contingency, by letting you unlink connections and let them float in space, until you find their new connection and add them back in, or delete them altogether. You might find it far easier to use a PC package on your PC to maintain your tree, uploading onto Ge-Reu periodically. This is what many of us do. If you dont want to splash out the £30 for FTM, there are cheaper alternatives or why not try PAF which you can download fro free from the Family Search website.

You can delete an individual. what you CANT do is delete an individual with decendants. This to me seems logial. if you have discovered someone wrong in your tree surely their decendants are wrong too?, otherwise just ammend the details of the person that is wrong. Jess - who may be missing somwthing here

Jess I don't think you are missing anything - however, as an example, I discovered that I had made a mistake - the woman I had always assumed to be my 2 x GGM and the mother of seven children, was in fact a second wife with the same first name (Margaret). By the time I discovered this fact, I had already entered all her (supposed) children, their descendants etc etc. Of course, it makes my tree quite wrong, but in order to correct this and delete her, I will need to first delete over 100 descendants. I have tried to amend her name, but it has left a messy muddle - I know what it means, but no-one else ever will. I think it is this situation which people are talking about - where ONE name is wrong, but everyone else is correct, rather than having followed a completely wrong family - hope that makes sense! Olde Crone

Hi, I was amazed to see this again, as I originally put this on the board about 16 months ago in August 2004, as there were so many people complaining about this at the time. I finally deleted my tree on this site, used PAF then bought FamilyTree Maker. I`ve now imported my tree a couple of months ago from FamilyTree, and do not add directly to the tree on here any more. It`s just so easy to make a mistake when you have generation after generation all using the same names over and over for their many offspring. At least if you`re using a programme that allows you to alter errors, which lots of us do make, then it`s so much easier on the nerves. I`ve even stopped chewing my nails now !! Jay.

Olde Crone, yes, this is the point I was making earlier. Genes re-united does not allow you to send a branch off into space by unlinking an individual who may well be wrong. It has no way of keeping track of the people who were connected to it. Sorry, but there is no fix for this on Ge Reu at the moment. The only solution is to maintain your master tree on your PC with a program such as FTM which will allow orphan branches.

Peter Sorry, I didnt make it clear that I have actually found the correct name for my 2 x GGM, who was the mother of all the children - the second wife (who I thought was the first, lol) didsnt have any descendants. I agree the simple solution is to have an off-line tree such as you describe, its just a question of getting round to doing it! Olde Crone

The other thing you have to do if you have duplicate entries is to edit the one you want to get rid of so that it is not an exact duplicate of the one you want to keep. I found that if you simply change the Christian name to 'Duplicated' or 'Unwanted' you can delete it once you have reduced the links to one.

Brian, Thank you so much for that! I think that might be the answer to the big problem with my GR tree. I'll have a go and see if it works. >*|*<

Thanks Brian It really works!! Tip worth knowing! Jill

I had just read all the entries with dread as I have discovered my information handed down from my father (now deceased) was incorrect. It seems my GGGM married the younger of the two brothers, older was John (which was the husband in my info) but the younger was Jonathon.The Tree allowed me to edit the details of John to make him Jonathon with no hitch...phew...I had all my rellies attached to this couple...lol...

It worries me that some people do not seem to have their Family Tree anywhere except on here. Please please please, get a F His Prog on your computer and keep the info on there. Any Website can go down or even cease to exist with no notice whatsoever, like clicking off a light switch. I would hate this to happen to people who had not thought about these possible consequences.

There are several reasons to use another program to keep a tree on separate from GR. Firstly you need the security of the backup,GR has had many problems including whole trees going missing. The option to delete/amend mistakes is far far easier on other programmes. Made a connection to another researcher?Worried that they may copy your entire tree onto GR (even the bits they are not connected to?) Then use a programme that allows you to send part of your tree as a Gedcom/Tree Chart attached to an e-mail. Do you have cousins who married? GR cannothandle this simple operation without a bit of messing around,(you have to add at least one person twice and the duplicated individual isn't obvious). Again a halfway decent (inexpensive) tree programme will show the proper connections far more easily. Want to add birth and adopted families to your tree? Gr can't do it on one tree.A halfway decent programme allows you to have the two trees available,and show the tree chart with whichever set of parents you select. A programme that allows the flexibility that GR doesn't is NOT expensive,if you look online you can buy a programme for as little as £8-£10. Just think £10 for the backup facility is worth the money alone. Glen

If you had descendants attached to the wrong partner, it used to be possible to ''unhook'' them and attach them to the right partner. Are you saying that you can't do that now? Christine

Has anyone tried to import an FTM tree complete with cousin marriages into GR? I know GR cannot handle cousin marriages without having to input the branches twice (groan!), so what does it do with FTM info? Does it automatically duplicate or does it simply lose the information?

You still have the option to change a person's parents if you go to the Parents tab. However, this function doesn't seem to be included in the new beta tree.

I imported my tree from FTM with cousins who married and they have been duplicated!! So it doesn't seem to make any difference. Wendy