Spouses have same ancestors; How do I show this?

[Jon Hand]

Hi. I'm very new to making family trees. I have a situation where my GGG grandfather married someone of the same last name. From my research, I found that their GGGGG grandfathers were brothers. Reunion has everything drawn in duplicates. I have their parents listed twice; the parents are shown far to the left showing only brother A; then these parents are shown again far to the right but only showing brother B. Is that normal? I would think that the tree should split from the brothers and then reconvene many generations later. Reunion seems to think that the brothers are half-brothers, but in fact they are brothers. Something isn't right. How do I tweak things? I hope I have explained this clearly. Thank you in advance. Jon

[TeriPettit]

Re: Spouses have same ancestors; How do I show this?

To fix this situation when it is detected after the fact, mark both copies of the couple that appear in duplicate, and then use the "Match & Merge People" function from the Change menu while viewing one of the duplicate parents, picking the Find Matches for Both and Compare with Marked Persons Only options. (You don't really have to do the marking step, but it is faster in a large file, and saves you from having to ignore a lot of potential matches for people who are really not the same person but just have similar names.) Consult the Help system for more details on using Match & Merge.

To minimize the occurrence of this happening in the first place, when adding spouses, parents and children try to make a practice of checking your index to see if you already have the person entered in another role, and using one of the methods to insert that same person into a new role in the tree (such as dragging them from a list into a space on the family view.)

I have a very large database (over 57,000 people) which covers a large percentage of the entire population in several counties of Kentucky and Virginia, so when adding a new child, spouse or parent, there is a pretty good chance that I've already added them as a spouse, child or parent of someone else. So I do this index check as a matter of routine. For example, if adding the children to a couple based on a census record, I first sort my index (People list) by birthdate and filter it by surname, then scan the list for any people with names and birthdates that match the children in the census, who have no parents displayed (typically these are the spouses or in-laws of other relatives). If I see some potential fits, then I go off and do additional research into source records to see if they are the same person. (One can't assume so right away, since often there are two or more people with the same name and similar birthdates in an area.) If the evidence pans out that they are the same person, I drag the old person into the new child list. If it is inconclusive, then I will type in a separate person, and just add a note such as "may be the same person as the Nancy Warren who married James H. Otis son of Daniel Otis and Mary E. Sorrell". Similar workflow when adding spouses, except that then you don't look for matching people with no parents entered, but instead for matching people who are not known to have a different spouse during the date in question.

[Bob White]

Re: Spouses have same ancestors; How do I show this?

.......when adding spouses, parents and children try to make a practice of checking your index to see if you already have the person entered in another role........

What Teri said... and the way I do this is simple. Make sure the right hand column is set for People and enter the last name of the person you propose to add (all or just partial), then eyeball it. This will catch most of the occurrences of your described situation. With spelling variations, etc., there is no perfect method.

[Jon Hand]

Re: Spouses have same ancestors; How do I show this?

Thank you very much. You have both been very helpful. I did what you suggested and it claimed that there were no duplicates. I finally solved the problem by editing spouses and children.