When building your family tree on Ancestry, it’s not uncommon to encounter duplicates. These can occur due to various reasons and can make your tree confusing and less accurate. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to identify and remove duplicates in your Ancestry family tree.
How To Identify the Causes of Duplicates
Duplicates in your family tree can be caused by:
- Multiple Entries: A person might be added to the family tree more than once, either by mistake or due to a misunderstanding of the platform’s functionality.
- Incorrect Connections: Errors can occur when people are incorrectly connected in the tree. For instance, someone might be mistakenly attached as a spouse instead of a child.
- Intra-Familial Marriages: Relatives marrying each other can cause duplicates. This is because the same person occupies two roles in the family, such as being both a cousin and a spouse.
- Sibling Marriages: A set of siblings marrying another set of siblings can also lead to duplicates.
How to Search for Duplicates In Ancestry
To check if you have duplicates in your family tree, navigate to the “Tree Search” from the top-right corner of your tree. In the admin panel that displays, click on “List of all people”. If a person is listed more than once, they are added multiple times in the tree, and all their versions should be merged together.
How To Remove Duplicates In Ancestry.com
If a duplicate person is listed in the tree only once, then the duplication may be caused by one of the other three reasons mentioned above. In these cases, the person appears twice in the family tree because they occupy two roles in the family. To handle these kinds of duplicates, you can switch your family tree view to pedigree or intentionally create a duplicate person to fix the issue.
Switching to Pedigree View
Duplicate people caused by relationship mistakes, siblings marrying siblings, or intra-familial marriage will display only when the tree is in family view. To stop displaying these kinds of duplications, switch your family tree to pedigree view with ancestors extending to left and right.
What Is the Most Common Way To Accidentally Create Duplicate Person Profiles in a Tree
Another way to handle duplication caused by intra-familial marriage or siblings set marrying to another siblings set is by creating a duplicate version of one of the spouses. Disconnect one of them from their parents, then create a duplicate version of that person to connect with their parents where you have disconnected the previous version.
Conclusion
Duplicates in a family tree can cause confusion and inaccuracies. It’s important to identify and remove these duplicates to maintain the integrity of your family history. Additionally, knowing how to correct mistakes on Ancestry.com is a crucial skill for ensuring the accuracy of your genealogical data. This guide provides you with the necessary steps to handle duplicates and correct errors in your Ancestry family tree. We hope it proves helpful and encourages you to share your thoughts and suggestions for further improvements.
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