Order of merging duplicate families

Question

I found a duplicate family for one that I just imported as part of a larger family tree. The dates and names were just off enough that they didn't trigger a merge when I did the import, but it is clearly the same family.

There is only one duplicate for most of the children in the family, but I've found three matches for their mother - she was Anonymous as a first name on one record.

Is there a preferred order for starting to request merges - that is, from the children up, or from the parents down?  And should the triple merge be done first?

For Harriet Cotton, the oldest record was Anonymous Cotton, Cotton-1184, the next Cotton-2291, and the third Cotton-2632.

Answer 1

I would start with the mother, as when you try to merge duplicate siblings, with different mothers/parent - you would get the message: Before completing this merge, compare/merge conflicting mothers.

For triple merges, merge both of the two higher numbers into Cotton-1184.

Comments

It's important to merge parents before the children. If you merge two profiles that have different parents, one parent (or a set of parents) will become disconnected from their child (and possibly unconnected from the entire tree), making it harder to discern their family relationships. Sometimes this even causes people to refuse to merge the parents' profiles later, because they don't see the relationship.