pritchet1 wrote:I just hit this snag recently too. I walked through the 80 pages for one name and then got this same message. I did the "Polish circle"(tm) twice and then gave up. I also see "combined" names of lots of people who are related, but not the same person. How do we uncombine those obviously wrong decisions, so the right/correct data is presented?
I've also seen records (my direct line) where one person is "Ready" to be sealed to another person's spouse, across generations. How do we "Unready" those obviously mistaken situations?
Most cases of confused relationships I have found in my tree have been caused by incorrect combining (automatic or otherwise, I don't know) of different real people into one combined record. In my opinion, the best solution is to
very carefully separate the records. I used a lot of paper, tape, and colored pen to be sure I would separate the records correctly. Here's how I did the split-ups I have done:
First, I printed screenshots of the combined records page. It would be nice if the page would print (to multiple paper pages) from a browser, but that was not working when I tried it. Second, I cut the edges and taped them together so that I had a large map-like sheet of paper. Third, I scanned the left-hand column for names of parents, names of spouses, dates, and such to get an idea of which two real people were involved. (If you have reliable sources to help with that, that's even better.) Fourth, I chose a different color for each real person and marked the left-hand column with the respective colors. Fifth, I marked the cells in the body of the table with the matching color. Sixth, I marked the header cell of each column with (hopefully) one color based on the colors in the cells in the body of the table. Finally, after a double-check of the details, I went back to nFS and marked the columns (making sure they hadn't changed or moved around) and did the split. Then, I checked the records to make sure the split had been done correctly.
In one case, I had a single component record, one with no identified contributor, that had conflicting information. For that record, I sent a request for help on nFS, and the support person took care of that one component record so I could split up the rest.