Essential Family Tree Maintenance Tips Every Genealogist Should Know

[@katwalker07]

There's a lot of endogamy in my Mother's family, so one of the things that I do is pull up the button and search for people's names in my tree before I add them. It's a couple of extra steps, but it has stopped a whole lot of duplicates and even a few triplicates. Also, as a cleanup, I'll pull up the tree name list, and just search out random names, like "Richard" or "Charles", and if I see any duplicates, I go to work. It's something that can be done pretty much anytime.

[@cynthiamgarner8096]

Thank you, Lisa! This video was an excellent reminder.

[@DragonflyDamsel]

Hi, I find your site very helpful. I have run into something I have been unable to rectify even with several calls to My Heritage. My tree has my maternal grandfather and grandmother listed three times with the same children, (I did not enter all these, only once, but somehow they were added two more times to my tree) therefore making one set of grandparents fine, but the other two listed as step grandparents and therefore listing same named children step sisters and stepbrothers of the same named siblings.. The only solution that was given to me was to delete my whole tree ( 5000 members) and start all over!😢 Any suggestions? This has messed up the relationship information for that whole side of my tree

[@rover790]

Sorry I dont have an answer to your problem. But, this sort of duplication I think happens when you accept smart matches and just add the info to your tree. I have had it happen to me, but I was able to delete the duplicates one by one as it wasn't too far into the tree.

[@feliciagaffney1998]

​@@rover790 yes. The same thing happened to me trying to enter my tree in Ancestry a few years ago. I actually only keep Word doc trees. So, trying to finally get it modernized, I started entering my parents... and accepting the "smart match" type things... it now has my father 3 times and my mom may be in there more than once. I stopped. I refuse to continue working on it until I can call Ancestry to fix it. I believe there's a way to merge people. The whole system that requires it to add a new person when it is obviously the same person just seems like a huge problematic bug.

[@feliciagaffney1998]

I don't know if Lisa has any suggestions... but... what if you download it into a GedCom file... and granted, I haven't even worked with GedComs before... but can you edit it there? Remove the duplicates, and then delete what's online and reload it? I always envision a GedCom file to be read in a spreadsheet. But, I could be wrong. Alternatively... there are other, little known, sites that accept GedCom files and will build trees. Maybe one of them will allow you to edit your tree there. You can Google other websites to build trees on. I plan in doing that with mine, to get it all digitalized and in a GedCom file. It is totally obnoxious that you cannot fix wrong people on these huge database sites. Seems like a HUGE defect in their system.

[@charlotteruse158]

You cant edit relationships and remove the duplicate Grandparents? If not that would create a big mess on all the profiles. I also don't understand how adding the same grand parents would automatically create step relationships. Who added those additional ones? Message them. Did you search the help or fax? Most sites don't want you to delete your whole tree and start over again.Because then it's just dead real estate and they have to pay for servers to store that information. I'm not familiar with my Heritage The handful of times I have gone there I have never found anything helpful and its poorly sourced. I'm on Wikitree.

[@charlotteruse158]

That's faqs not fax lol.