Question

adding family members and waiting on a merge leaves my tree empty.

Comments

If there is one thing genealogy has taught me: patience.

It will come, hang in there!

Answer 1

I hear ya, David! You are not alone! I'm told that you don't have to propose and wait on merges if you don't create duplicates, BUT no matter how hard I try I can't help creating duplicates. Just yesterday it happened again. Here's why...the person already in WikiTree had a birth date which was estimated and off by TWENTY years! So he didn't show up as a match when I created my profile (using accurate dates from his Will, Censuses, and his Find A Grave memorial.)  I found him later, when I tried to create a profile for one of his children which did have a match and, lo and behold, a father with very incorrect vital information. So now I have to wait on someone who hasn't been active on WikiTree for a couple of years to approve the merge, or 30 days, whichever comes first.

Don't even get me started on waiting on people to add me to trusted lists so I can improve other profiles..

Answer 2

Hi David and welcome to WikiTree.  Your tree is hardly empty - it has about 20 million profiles … that's how many are on WikiTree and now *YOU* share them with all the rest of us members here!

OK, maybe that was not an answer to what you wanted to ask here … I'll try to be good, now that I got that out of my system … seriously, though, I expect you mean your twig that will grow into a branch and connect to the big tree.  That, too, is not empty, though.  I see that you have started to add profiles for your parents and their parents and are still going farther back.  That's great - by going back and also sideways (adding profiles for siblings of your ancestors and then for their spouses and descendants) will lead to you connecting to the main tree here.

I do have a problem with the merge you proposed, though.  Merges are what we do to remove duplicate profiles from the tree when they are discovered to have been accidentally created.  You proposed a merge between two profiles that are very clearly not duplicates.  That needs to be removed - if it were to go through, it would eliminate one of the profiles for someone who deserves to have his/her own profile here.

Comments

Oh dear, David. That merge proposal looks like you maybe wanted to connect https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hardman-590 as the father to https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hardman-1636 - is that it?

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Oh yes, here they are, together in the census:

"Canada, Prairie Provinces Census, 1916," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KM56-45X : 11 March 2018), Ruth Hardman in household of Alden Hardman, Alberta, Canada; citing p. 17, line 47; Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; FHL microfilm 2,434,963.