Merging duplicates

Can you give us a link?

Is this the Timothy Daniel Sullivan you are referring to: Timothy Daniel Sullivan ?

Yes. It is Catherine (Kate) Sullivan Healy (sorry I see I made an error in my first message, it should be - Healy not Baylor - ), who is duplicated.

I've received a message from your Geni Team, Anne-Marie, asking me why I have deleted Catherine Healy. I will reply to her as well

Anne-Marie is a Curator, not my or our Geni Team - Curators are Volunteers with extra powers given them in exchange for their efforts at improving Geni.

Deleting Profiles on Geni tends to be mightily frowned upon. Also often ineffective, since the person that created it can just undelete it. It is often considered better to merge the duplicates, rather than delete one of them (tho there are exceptions where deleting makes sense/is preferred).

If you would like, I can tag Anne-Marie in this discussion, so you can discuss the situation with her in this Public Discussion we all can see, or you and she can work out how to make things right in Private Geni-Messages between the two of you.
If you go with the latter, would love if you would post here if it all gets worked out, so we know there was a happy ending.

Thank you for all your responses. I realize I should have searched here before trying to fix the situation.
This was the correspondence between Anne Marie and myself. To add to this, I did not delete Catherine Healy, I changed the name to match the duplicate entry because I thought that would help to merge the two. I didn't realize at that stage that it was linked to another tree.

Hi Martina,

Was there a reason you deleted the profile of Catherine Healy?
Catherine Sullivan

Note, it is always better to contact the managers of the profile in case it has wrong information when it is not a profile you created yourself, this can been seen as vandalism, you probably did not know

Anne Marie

My reply:

Hi Anne Marie,

I put a message on the discussion board regarding this, asking how I can merge the duplicate entries that have resulted because someone has linked their tree with mine. I read what instructions are available on your site, but it didn't work. I tried to merge the two entries but apparently this isn't working because, as I then discovered, it was an issue from another tree. I was under the impression this problem with the Geni site, had been eliminated and that others could not link their trees without permission..

This is a very unfortunate issue with Geni and the reason I ceased to use it for a long time, and have now again been put off it. It should not be possible for others to link their tree without permission. I had problems in the past, with incorrect information occurring in my tree because someone else had linked incorrect information.

The Sullivan - Healy marriage and children is a mess. It shows some of the children as step-children which is not the case, but has resulted because of the duplicate entry of the mother, and three of the children. Several years ago the same person had the wrong wife entered for Timothy Daniel Sullivan. It is possible this has arisen from that time when I changed the name and had some correspondence then with the manager of that profile. It has been years since then and they have still not corrected the issues. How long is one expected to wait?

Your site should not have the ability for others to link their trees without permission and if that were the case then one would not be called a vandal for trying to correct one's own tree.
Even the free WikiTree cannot be altered or edited without being authorized.

I am so fed up with this happening.:

Martina Marie Barrett - on Geni, the goal is One World Tree.
At times, the rules have not allowed merging with a Separate Tree (one not attached at all to the World Tree) without the permission of a Manager on that Separate Tree.
And at times the rules have allowed Curators to do that. In fact, have even encouraged them to do that.

And once a Tree is part of the World Tree, then anyone can merge profiles to Public Profiles in the Tree. Curators are currently, I believe, supposed to get permission before merging a Profile with a Private Profile with an Active Manager - but if you were not active, then that would not have been required.

I see lots of frustration with the fact the merge was done without your permission - but basically nothing explaining what information is incorrect.
Anne (who posted in this discussion) and Anne Marie are both Curators who, I am sure, would be very willing to work with you to correct any errors. But probably not to unmerge or disconnect unless folks who are not in fact the same have been incorrectly merged. Again, I do not see statements to that effect above.
Hope you are able to give them all the info needed to get everything cleaned up.

Well some-one has fixed it!! Thank you whoever you are.
The trees are no longer linked. I can now re-enter Timothy Daniel and his connections - who have disappeared, but that's no problem.
It's a shame that the person who did merge the trees in the first place, and was obviously a Curator, didn't work with me so that the objective of Geni was maintained.
Thank you for your explanation Lois.
The Morman site Family Search has a similar objective but contains a lot of incorrect information now that anyone can post on it. But at least it can be edited when one finds errors. Thank you all for your contributions and for "being there".

Martina - I see Timothy Daniel Sullivan still there Timothy Daniel Sullivan - along with connections -- so no, it would not be correct for you to re-enter him (or them) -- -- or do you mean a completely different person with the same name? Or??

Lois, that link has apparently been disconnected from my Tree.I'm totally bamboozled because it indicates my name as part Manager of the tree. But that is not what I see when I log into my tree. Six hours ago my tree had only Catherine (Kate) Sullivan displayed and no husband or ancestors, but all the descendants minus all the additional ones from the tree that had been linked to mine, so it must have been disconnected in some way. I have entered them (before receiving your warning) because they weren't there!!
You probably have better, or other means of access that I know nothing about, but If I follow the link that you have supplied to Timothy Sullivan that you have entered, I see all the previous (muddled) information on the profile page, but if I then select "Tree" from the bar at the top of the page, it takes me to a totally different tree which has only myself as Manager. This one:
Timothy Daniel Sullivan

Jonathan Scott Krengel - you were the one doing the most recent changes that Martina refers to here: https://www.geni.com/discussions/198834?msg=1312731

Private User you are a Manager of several of the Profiles she is referring to and Anne Brannen you commented above -
Can one or more of you please help Martina out here?
-- see her posts above, esp. one directly above

This is Martina's newly added profile for Timothy Sullivan: Timothy Daniel Sullivan complete with newly added relatives of him
and the "old" version for Timothy Sullivan: Timothy Daniel Sullivan (managed by you, Ann-Marie, and by Martina) andcomplete with relatives of him
Are these really totally different folks?
If not, please work with Martina until all is well, and if possible help her to get a better grasp of how Geni works

I did make some changes to fix the duplication of a profile that wouldn't merge. It had a marriage relationship between the duplicates.

I may have accidentally disconnected the children at that time... The revision history is impossible to follow due to the way the relationships were messed up and due to the delete and restore of profiles.

To my un-informed eye, these do appear to be the same people and may need merging again.

Not looking at source data, it seems like the Healy side is out of whack. Possible wrong parents...

Some of my sources have been history books, and those published by the family themselves. It was scrupulously checked some years ago. I will try and find the verification to enter on the site.
I have checked and the Healy branch is correct in my current tree. But it is a very difficult tree because there is so much inter-marriage - cousins, uncles, double-alliances, so it may well look wrong.

Working on it Lois, but it was not me who had made the recent changes.
No offence but I do not think that private messages between people should be posted in public threads

Private User - I understood you did not make the recent changes. Also saw you were a Curator who had worked with some of those at some time, so possibly had some knowledge of what is going on - as well as the fact of being a Curator meaning having been vetted with having a decent amount of skill plus having extra tools for helping fix problems.
Hopefully, working together with Martina the two of you can tease out how things really should be.

I know some folks object to PM's being shared publicly, but also know it is frequently done.
See absolutely nothing wrong with Martina's doing so above, especially since most of it is the message she sent, which she certainly has a perfect right to share with anyone she chooses, including in a Public Discussion - and which helped give a clearer picture of where she was coming from.
and didn't see anything in the PM she shared from you that was of a private nature and/or that you might want kept confidential [rather the opposite - paragraph starting with "Note" was good advice for all to see]

(on the other hand, if you read my last paragraph above where she shared the PMs as
suggesting she post private messages here - re-read and think you will agree it was not actually)

Sorry Anne-Marie. I hadn’t realised your correspondence with me was private. In fact I tried to locate it on the website to refer to. The messages all pop up in my email in the same way so I didn’t differentiate between them. There wasn’t anything I would have considered private or I would have realised it wasn't via a discussion group.
Certainly private messages shouldn't be posted on a public board.
My reason for posting it was to let all these people who were so helpful here know that
I had obviously upset someone with my method of trying to fix the situation.

Since then I have noticed your name appears on the tree that was linked to mine as (a manager? curator?) i had only ever noticed the Guinness name because I recognized it as a branch of the Sullivan tree. Perhaps it was you with whom I had some correspondence several years ago? But I don't recognize your name at all.

I realise now, although I’ve been using Geni for many years, that there’s a lot I
hadn’t known. I do think there should be permission sought though before merging trees. Or it should be possible, if a discrepancy occurs, that it can be corrected, in the way that Wikipedia works. Why is it okay for one person to mix up the relationships in a tree, but not okay for another family member to fix it? I would certainly appreciate if any mistakes I made were corrected. Of course I'd prefer I was advised first. But if I then ignored the request to fix it, then they should be able to make the corrections.

Anyway I do appreciate the efforts you have all made.