HOWTO: Find the bad merge in a "stack"

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Often you will find a profile that has profiles linked to it, pending their merge. This can be a one other profile, or any number of them. This known as a "stack", because the duplicate profile in the tree(s) have been stacked on each other. You can see this stack by pressing the link in their profile, which then displays a pair of profiles next to each other, so they can be compared and merged (eventually).

Sometimes, for various reasons (mostly carelessness or incorrect GEDCOM files) people will be put into the WRONG stacks. i.e. someone suggested merging two profiles for two DIFFERENT people. If these profiles were to be merged, the tree would become a mess, and would be rather difficult and annoying to fix. So we have to find these bad matches in the stack and press the UNDO button, before someone accidentally completes the merge.

The problem with the comparison screen is that all of the multiple parents, spouses or children can get lumped together, making finding the bad one difficult.

The following is a brief, somewhat circular, method of trying to find the bad merge. It works... most of the time.

One small trick to find the bad merge:

1) Go to the actual profile of the "stack". You do this by pressing the link of their name at the top.

2) Look at the lists of parents, spouses and children.

3) IF you can identify the wrong connection by the name of parent / spouse / child, then click on the link to THAT profile.

4) Now look in the complementary list for the name of the profile you STARTED from. (The complementary list for the initial profile's parents, would be their children, and vice versa. For a spouse, it would be... their spouse). Click on that name.

5) In most cases, this will take you to the specific profile in the stack, that is wrongly merged. If it took you back to the original profile, then the merge has most likely already been completed. :-(

6) If you click on the "View his other profiles and complete the pending merges." link in this profile, it will take you to the correct place in the stack.

7) Press the undo merge button.

8) Press the reload button on your browser to get an updated view of the stack. This can usually be done by pressing CTRL+R.

Repeat as needed.

It should be noted that often, by undoing a single merge, you can split the entire stack into two stacks. In these cases it would be a good idea to review the other stack as well, to make sure the matches there are valid as well. The easiest way to do this is, in step #6, to open that link in a NEW window or tab. That way you will not have lost track of it.

Hope this is of assistance.

5/2/2010 at 3:25 AM

Shmuel, thanks! also I note that if you have two stacks in the list of merges, it seems that only the top name is displayed, making it very easy to merge a "rotten" stack onto a "good" stack, leaving a mess that has your name in the "merged by" field.... I unstacked a stack today that had people's names in the stack that definitely would not have created it.

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