Monday, August 18, 2014

Best Way to Match Parents in Familysearch Family Tree Using RootsMagic - Part I

I have matched hundreds of persons in my RootsMagic 6 genealogy database with profiles in the FamilySearch Family Tree.  The major problem I have had is with matching parents of the person I'm working on.

I think that I have finally found the "best way" to do this, but it took me a long time to get the idea.  I cannot find anything in the RootsMagic Help information about this, nor do I recall anyone else writing about it.  But it's important if you are matching persons using RootsMagic (or any other program, I think).

Here is the problem:

1)  On the RootsMagic "FamilySearch Person Tools" screen, I want to match the parents of my person (Eunice Rayment) with the parents attached to my person in the FamilySearch Family Tree:


2)  I want to match the Father in RootsMagic (Samuel Rayment on the left list on the screen above) with the Father in FamilySearch Family Tree (Samuel Raymond on the right list above).  And do the same thing with the Mother.

To do this, I have been clicking on the RootsMagic Father, then finding matches for him already in Family Tree.

3)  After I find and select one or more matches for the Father, when I come back to the "Share Data" screen, I see:


As you can see, there are now two Samuel Raymond profiles on the FamilySearch side of the screen, with the same ID number on the Family Tree side of the screen.

4)  Then I do the same thing for the Mother - I clicked on the RootsMagic mother and matched her with one or more FamilySearch Mothers.

5)  The result is shown below:


I now have this profile (the child, Eunice Rayment) with three sets of parents in the Family Tree - one for the couple, one for the Father with an Unknown mother, and one for the Mother with an unknown father.  I've made the FamilySearch Family Tree much worse!  I still don't understand how that happens, but it does.

6)  The only way to correct this problem (that I've found) is to go to the FamilySearch Family Tree profile for the matched RootsMagic person (in this case, the child, Eunice Rayment).  Here is the Family Members section of the profile for Eunice Rayment (two screens):



As you can see on the two screens above, the three different families all have the same child.

7)  To rectify this problem, the user has to do the following operation for the families that have only one parent:

**  Run the mouse over the Child's name and click on the "Edit Parents" link.
**  Click the "Delete relationship" link on the top right of the screen
**  Add a cogent reason to the field that appears for the action
**  Click the two check boxes below the "Reason" field
**  Click the blue "DFelete" button below the check boxes.

Here is the "Delete Relationship" screen for one of the relationships:


8)  I did the same thing for the other "family with one parent" and both "spurious families" disappeared in the Family Tree.  Here's the bottom of the "Family Members" section on the Eunice Rayment (the child) profile:


As you can see, there is only the one family with the child Eunice Rayment now.

9)  Back to RootsMagic, I refreshed the screen, and now the Father and Mother in RootsMagic are matched to the Father and Mother in the Family Tree, and there are no spurious parents listed on the FamilySearch side of the screen:


10)  So what is the preferred way to match Parents of a person using the RootsMagic "FamilySearch Person Tools"?  I will show how I've learned to do it in the next post in this series.

11)  To reiterate - DO NOT USE the method shown above to match Parents of a Person using the RootsMagic "FamilySearch Person Tools."  It creates problems in the Family Tree database, and requires extra work to fix.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2014/08/best-way-to-match-parents-in.html

Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


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