G2G: Merging father and son

Question

The two Joels look different here

http://www.wikitree.com/genealogy/Walters-Family-Tree-911

but both links go to the same profile.

I'm seeing a number of these lately.  It seems to happen when a father and son are merged without being disconnected.

In this case I guess they were different Joels and shouldn't have been merged.

 

 

Comments

Oh dear :(   looks like three generation got merged 902 merged with his father 903 b.1825, that had been merged with his father 909.

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The Joel Walters merge was completed 29 June 2012. I have seen others like this and I am really curious how the pedigree display still shows the birth year and death year for a profile that no longer exists. I guess the pedigree display data must be stored in some unconnected file.

2 other examples:

Alexander McCotter-29

Morris Hobbs-294

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Wow, what an interesting bug you've found. Especially with the pedigree tree. It also looks like Joel (902/903/909) is now his own grandpa -- somehow listed as brother to Henry (911). Joel (909) originally listed Samuel (918) as father, leaving him now disconnected from the tree.

question - can merges be undone? i.e. by following the "restore the data" links in the change logs? I haven't tried it, and I don't want to get in the way of debugging this problem by WikiTechs (nor make the problem worse).

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No, merges can't be undone.

Joel is appearing as Henry's half-brother, on his mother's side, because Henry has the wrong mother.  But that's a separate issue really.

Answer 1

I just tried one of these merges, and they do work, but you do have to be careful to pick the father you want to keep.  The completion page is very apt to make the wrong default choice - either to keep the father you're trying to merge away, or for the final profile to keep itself as its own father.

Answer 2

We have a category "[[Category:Bad Merge]]" that should be put on this profile.  We have a team of people who have experience in how to "UNDO" bad merges.   What we have found is that the more you try to fix these kinds of issues, the worse it gets, so we have a process for fixing them.

Comments

I added the Category:Bad Merge to Walters-902, Alexander McCotter-29, Morris Hobbs-294 and Hall-8782, another one I just located. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I know what happens now.

Suppose you have Smith-14, and his father is Smith-27, and his father is Smith-39.

And you try to merge 14 and 27.  This may or may not be a good idea.  But anyway.

The merge completion page comes up with 14 as destination, and a choice of fathers - 39 green, 27 yellow, with yellow as default.

That is, the default choice of father to keep is the profile you're trying to merge away.

If you're awake and you tick the green box, all is well.  But if you accept the default, the poor computer will try to follow your weird instructions, with weird results.

Comments

I remember seeing a proposal not long ago for a test server where people could experiment with uploading their gedcoms, etc., and its db gets reset every week.

It sure would be nice to have, in order to test these theories.