Suddenly I have a lot of unconnected profiles.

Question

Is there another breakdown? I must have 150 and I know they were connected before. They seem to have lost a lot of information. It is across multiple lines, locations and years. For example, about half of my grandmother's siblings were disconnected and the other half were okay.

Comments

Check the Changes pages for the disconnected and see if someone has been editing them. There was a wikitree member whose account is now closed who was detaching some profiles from the parents because they weren't listed in find a grave or My heritage, etc.

---

No, not in those I checked. Example Ryan 2062, a child who died as an infant. ALL connections were gone...mom, dad, sibs. ALL dates and locations were gone. When I reconnected him to parents some sibs showed up and others didn't. It seems to have added general sources (like parents' marriage, census for family but after this child died, etc.)  for the family too, not sure why.

---

funny you should ask as I just was checking for unconnected on my watchlist - but mine are all fine - hope your unhooks are only temporary

---

I also note that in another family half the children are connected to their parents and the others are floating free of any connections, dates, locations, etc. - same as the Ryan previously cited.

---

The Ryan-2062 profile was created by Cheryl as part of the same January 2013 Gedcom import  that created the Lucas family (discussed in my comment later in this discussion) and the parents that were supposedly attached to Ryan-2062 are people whose profiles were created by the same indygrandma.ged on 02 January 2011 that created the two profiles inexplicably connected to Thomas Lucas. As with the Thomas Lucas profile, it would have been technically impossible for Cheryl to connect a person created in her Gedcom import to pre-existing profiles in WikiTree.

Answer 1

I'm not seeing a problem.

Answer 2

I'm not seeing a problem with my own watchlist, but it may be happening on Cheryl's watchlist.

It's possible that an edit (probably an LNAB change) was made to a key person on the connection path around the time that Connection Finder was updating, so the connection is temporarily broken until the next update.

Do you remember who was on the connection paths that you saw for this family previously?

Comments

There is a strange history on some profiles that Cheryl edited recently. For example, see the history of the parents in this edit: https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Lucas-1740&diff=69961318&oldid=8356408

I'm moving this to WikiTree Tech, as I think there may be a bug in the system.

---

We are seeing several unusual things on genealogical web sites recently. Access Genealogy which hosts personal sites, gen society sites and many GenWeb sites was down.

---

That bug is well known -- that's why there is the"Note: It's possible for a change to the parents or marriage of Thomas J. to be improperly attributed to Cheryl." message at the bottom of the change.

There hasn't been a noticeable jump in total unconnected people so I don't think there is a system-wide issue.

---

In this case, the issue with the parents isn't with possible misidentification of the member who made a change. The edit history shows a completely different pair of people as parents. (Look at the names.)

ADDED: The "parents" supposedly connected to that profile previously were two women with life dates in two different centuries.

---

Yes, because Cheryl added different parents later. She seems to have done a lot of parent changes lately, which is probably why the number of unconnected people in her watchlist has changed.

---

I think there's something corrupt in the database if it's showing that Thomas Lucas's parents were previously recorded as Johanna Yenter and Elizabeth Ruffin.

---

I did parent stuff this morning in trying to reconnect people before I gave up. I probably did a dozen.

---

I don't understand "connection path." If you are asking if I know who their relatives are, these examples have been from direct line relatives so I know who they are.

---

@Ellen

Thomas was created with Johanna Yenter and Elizabeth Ruffin as his parents. https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Lucas-1740&diff=prev&oldid=8356408

At some point between 2013 and 2018, those two parents were removed. Because of the relationship tracking bug, that removal was attributed to Cheryl when she made the next change https://www.wikitree.com/index.php?title=Lucas-1740&diff=next&oldid=8356408

Unless someone else reports something weird going on, I don't think there is anything unusual going on with the database.

---

That particular one is minor and isolated. There were approximately 150 of them.

---

Someone suggested on FB that there is a problem with Amazon web service.

---

Yes, the changes log shows that Cheryl created Thomas Lucas (born 1847) with Johanna Yenter (a woman born about 1905) as his father and Elizabeth Ruffin (a woman, married in 1828 to a man named Cocke) as his mother. However, Thomas' profile and other profiles for the family also show that the profiles for Thomas and his parents Jabez Lucas and Elizabeth Airy all were created by the same Gedcom import in January 2013. The profiles for Johanna Yenter and Elizabeth Ruffin both were created in January 2011 by a completely different Gedcom import, imported by a user whose account has been closed and identity has been erased. When the Lucas family profiles were created (in 2013), it was technically impossible to connect a newly created Gedcom profile with a profile that was already in WikiTree. So not only would it have been totally irrational of Cheryl to connect Thomas to those two women as his parents, but it would have been technically impossible for her to do so. If Thomas' profile was connected to two parents when it was created, it has to have been connected to two people whose profiles were created by the same Gedcom that created Thomas' profile.

The error we're seeing in the changes log is serious, making me think that the database information that went into the changes log has been badly corrupted. (Maybe this happened when the now-closed WikiTree account that imported indygrandma.ged on 02 January 2011 was erased. Erased contribution histories worry me, both because we can no longer research the changes and because the erasure of one person's records may affect other data elements.) Cheryl says that her recent edits to add parents to a number of profiles were made because she noticed that these children had been disconnected from their parents. That suggests that it's not just the changes log that was corrupted -- something went awry that corrupted profile data, too.

---

Ah ok, I see what you mean.

---

I still don't think that is what caused the newly unconnected people though, since it seems that the 2011 gedcom creator was deleted before 2014, and the dev server (which is running on a months-old copy of the database) has the same stuff in the change history.