Version AIO64-5.2.3 Windows
Trying to merge Family Trees … message comes up “ A parent and child cannot be merged. To merge these people you must first break the relationship between them”
What does this mean? Parents have children that marry and then also have children. Why can’t future families be a part of the original tree?
I have read so much about merging…eg. export to GRAMPS XML etc … family trees from different data bases cannot be merged… and on and on that my head is spinning.
Sorry but I was born pre-tech and I don’t understand what is being said let alone know how to do these things
I have spent years collecting information originating from one couple back in the 1700’s, their children, grandchildren down to my own grandchildren etc etc… Pages and pages of the stuff. They are all connected and I would like to have one tree
If it means I have started out wrong and have to start again, I’m happy to do that
You are misreading the difficulty.
You either :
- do not want to merge those 2 persons because they are different people
- have a family created with the supposed duplicate as the child of the other duplicate
So you need to resolve the conflict before a merge is possible.
Perhaps one is a “Junior” or namesake? If so, don’t merge.
Adding a spouse to a Child does not use a ‘merge’
There may be a basic misunderstanding of terminolgy.
A Tree and a Family are different in this situation.
A Family consists of 2 parents and their offspring. The offspring can be biological, adoptive, stepchildren, etc. But they do not include in-laws, grandchildren or grandparents.
A traditional (no divorces, re-marriage, adoptions, blended families) situation will have a Person as part of 2 different families: 1st where they are offspring; and 2nd later when they marry and start their own family.
A “Tree” is a cascade of these 2 family connections for each person.
In Gramps terms, a tree is a collection of people and their relations, stored in a single database. Gramps doesn’t care whether they’re all connected, or how, but there are a few restrictions, including the fact that a person can’t be his or her own parent or child.
When you ask Gramps to search for duplicate persons, you may occasionally see suggestions that show a parent and child on the same line, and when you try to merge those, Gramps will block that.
Can you tell us a bit more about what you’re doing? Are you trying to merge branches that were once in different trees, or combining a tree with a GEDCOM downloaded from Ancestry?
Firstly, thank you all for your time and patience.
When I started, I had already downloaded and installed GRAMPS. Then found a You Tube tutorial on how to create person/s, how to create families, marry person/s , add children, etc.
I split my computer screen, opened GRAMPS, and followed the You Tube instructions step by step entering my data
Eventually I had a list of families with individual trees but found when I clicked on Relationships or charts none of these families were connected as they should have been.
That’s when I started researching ways of connecting these families into one tree.
And yes, in some of the families children have been named after the parents. In some cases the child died at birth or shortly after and further resulting children were also given the parents’ names. So I have recurring names throughout. e.g.” Maria” seems to have been a popular name in all families down the line each with the same surname but different birth/death dates.
OK, I think that I get it. You have a lot of unconnected 2 generation trees in one database, where the parent in one may be the same person as the child in another, and plan to connect them by merging. Is that right?
And if it is, are you using the find duplicate persons tool, or do you pick them by hand?
Ennoborg - I think the answer to your question is “yes”
Thank you for the tip on “Duplicates”. Ran it, found a heap, cleaned up the database. Ran again and now do not have any duplicates.
Clicked Families, selected the first two in the generation, clicked Merge, selected the primary, clicked OK.
Still getting the message “A parent and child cannot be merged. To merge these people you must first break the relationship between them.”
How can I break the relationship between them if they are father and son?
Or is there another way to merge these families (I currently have 9 Families) to create one tree?
Open the Family Editor for each of those 2 persons (just the 1st of the 9 pairs) and please post screen captures.
That should give us enough information to answer.
Here’s a father/son sample from the sample.ged tree provided with each Gramps installation:
You will see that Gus Smith [I0015] exists as a child of Gustaf Smith [I0024]. So they cannot be merged.
But if Gus was actually a 2nd marriage for Gustaf and not his son with the same vital dates, then you would remove Gus from the marriage (click the - button with Gus’s row highligted in the Gustaf Smith and Anna Hansdotter family) before merging Gustaf and Gus.
You will notice that the 3rd and 4th offspring in Gustaf and Anna’s family were named Hjalmar Smith. These are NOT duplicates and should not be merged even though they have the same parents. The 3rd child died aged 1 year, 7 months, 25 days. The 4th child was a namesake… either of the 3rd child or the person whose 1st namesake died.
I think you need to forget about “merging” as it has you going in circles.
Start in Families and open the one with your mother and Father, you should be in there as the child plus any siblings.
Now open or create a family record for your grandparents for your mother and father (2 records). If you have already created the people records you can just add them from the list. Repeat this for each generation.
Visually you can see this better in Charts and can click on the empty family to add it.
Also, at some point if you run the End of Line report with you being the home person, you will see where people are missing in each generation.
Hope this helps
Dave
Normaly, there should be no need to merge persons or families, because you only need to add persons and connections that don’t yet exist in the database. What I mean is that you start with someone, like yourself, and then add your spouse, children, their spouses and children, and follow a similar path back in time, by adding your parents, their parents, and doing the same for your spouse. And if you do that, you won’t create duplicates, except in cases where you and your spouse are related, and you don’t recognize some names that already exist in your tree. And in that case, you need to merge persons indeed.
This is how my late father created our tree in Brother’s Keeper, and how I continued his works in PAF, before I migrated to Gramps, where many things are less obvious as they were in PAF, or are in competing programs like Ancestral Quest or RootsMagic.
I must add, that I haven’t really viewed any of the YouTube video’s, because I learn by doing, experimenting, not reading or viewing.
When you compare Gramps with these programs, you will soon see that Gramps has more screens, and also more ways to do things, like adding a spouse, or a child, or parents. And between those ways, I always choose to work with the Relationships screen, or Category, in Gramps lingo:
Gramps 5.2 Wiki Manual - Categories - Gramps
I use this screen, because it works a bit like a web browser, where all persons are hyperlinks, with all sorts of buttons next to them, like + to add a new person, or family, - to remove a connection to a person or family (which does not remove the person or family itself), a paper with pencil to edit one, and a list with a pointing finger that you can use to select an existing person or family.
You will also find buttons in the toolbar with different tasks, which make this a very powerfull screen, once you get used to it.
Now, if you have a person which is a duplicate of his or her parent, it helps to make that the active person in this view, and when you do that, and have enough dates attached to see that they are actually the same, you can click the - button next to the Family heading to disconnect this person from their parent family. That’s how I work when I make a mistake, and once that’s done, I can merge both persons, which is something that I normally do in the Persons screen.
Thank you guys! Major breakthrough and progress today
Just one thing: Charts… I noticed it shows a direct line from me back to 1762 (as far as I got today) but it does not show siblings, their marriages and children of the different generations (?) I’ve entered all these in the different families along the way but only the parents of each generation shows in the chart(?).
Try looking at the family from the other direction.
You can make that 1762 ancestor the Active Person and use the Descendants or Descendant Fan Chart gramplet
Or consider the Descendants Lines or Family Tree addon reports.
Try the Graph View addon. It allows the user to set how many generations both back and forward from the active person. It also has an All Connected option that will then expand the display out sideways including the in-laws. The view can get big quite fast and is limited to 1000 people.