Help: linking in Legacy 4.0

[Cùipo]

Hello. I'm using the Standard Edition of Legacy 4.0, and I need help
with linking to an existing person.

I'm adding a spouse, and this spouse and her family already exist in the
tree , so I click on "Link to an existing person". I click on the
person I want to link to, and sure enough that person now appears as the
spouse. The problem is that this process seems to kill links to this
person's parents, who now appear as "Unknown" both here in her married
family and at her original natural family. If I try to fix things by
linking these "unknown" parents to who they should be, then they loose
their links to their own parents, and so on.

What am I doing wrong?

[cecilia]

[email protected] wrote:

[...]Standard Edition of Legacy 4.0 [...]
I'm adding a spouse, and this spouse and her family already exist in the
tree , so I click on "Link to an existing person". I click on the
person I want to link to, and sure enough that person now appears as the
spouse. The problem is that this process seems to kill links to this
person's parents, who now appear as "Unknown" both here in her married
family and at her original natural family. [...]

Odd. It's not like that for me.

Do you want to send more details (what sort of family the spouses had
before the link, etc.)?

[Cùipo]

cecilia wrote:

[email protected] wrote:

[...]Standard Edition of Legacy 4.0 [...]
I'm adding a spouse, and this spouse and her family already exist in the
tree , so I click on "Link to an existing person". I click on the
person I want to link to, and sure enough that person now appears as the
spouse. The problem is that this process seems to kill links to this
person's parents, who now appear as "Unknown" both here in her married
family and at her original natural family. [...]


Odd. It's not like that for me.

Do you want to send more details (what sort of family the spouses had
before the link, etc.)?

Thanks for your reply. Actually, what I now realize is going on is that
when I link to an existing person, that person ends up with two sets of
parents: the correct set from the original entry, and a pair of
"unknown" presumably from the pre-linked new person. If I click on
"view... parents" I see both pairs, with the unknown pair first and
therefore appearing as the default. I can solve the problem by deleting
the unknown parents, but I'm still puzzled regarding why that should
happen in the first place.

[cecilia]

<[email protected]> wrote:

cecilia wrote:
[email protected] wrote:

[...]Standard Edition of Legacy 4.0 [...]
I'm adding a spouse, and this spouse and her family already exist in the
tree , so I click on "Link to an existing person". I click on the
person I want to link to, and sure enough that person now appears as the
spouse. The problem is that this process seems to kill links to this
person's parents, who now appear as "Unknown" both here in her married
family and at her original natural family. [...]

Odd. It's not like that for me. [...]

[...] what I now realize is going on is that
when I link to an existing person, that person ends up with two sets of
parents: the correct set from the original entry, and a pair of
"unknown" presumably from the pre-linked new person. If I click on
"view... parents" I see both pairs, with the unknown pair first and
therefore appearing as the default. [...]

I don't understand who is meant by "pre-linked new person".

If I have husband AAA, wife BBB, and son CCC
and husband DDD, wife EEE, and daughter FFF
and get CCC into the individual box, and then
Add Wife
Link to an EXISTING person
and select FFF, FFF only has one set of parents.

If I create male GGG, and then
Add Wife
Link to an EXISTING person
and select FFF, FFF still only has one set of parents, but now has two
spouses.

I have had problems adding existing parents. It doesn't sound like
your problem, but I give it below anyway.

If one has a parent and a child and wants to add the other parent, it
is the parent that should be the central generation. Then when adding
the spouse one is asked whether to
Add this person to the currently displayed marriage record

This option isn't there when adding the spouse in a parent box, ie
with the child as central. There's no problem if the parents don't
exist, but one gets duplicate marriages if they are pre-existing.

Eg, if I create male HHH, and then add an existing father, choosing
AAA, I then get AAA as having two spouses, and if I add BBB as mother,
I get the AAA-BBB marriage as having occurred twice, with CCC and HHH
as children of different marriages between the same people.

Legacy seems to expect this to happen when one doesn't intend it -
there is a Help topic "Married to the Same Spouse More than Once".

I am gradually learning to avoid adding existing parents to an
individual, but, rather, get the parents as the central individuals
and add the child.

[Cùipo]

cecilia wrote:

[email protected]> wrote:

cecilia wrote:

[email protected] wrote:


[...]Standard Edition of Legacy 4.0 [...]
I'm adding a spouse, and this spouse and her family already exist in the
tree , so I click on "Link to an existing person". I click on the
person I want to link to, and sure enough that person now appears as the
spouse. The problem is that this process seems to kill links to this
person's parents, who now appear as "Unknown" both here in her married
family and at her original natural family. [...]

Odd. It's not like that for me. [...]

[...] what I now realize is going on is that
when I link to an existing person, that person ends up with two sets of
parents: the correct set from the original entry, and a pair of
"unknown" presumably from the pre-linked new person. If I click on
"view... parents" I see both pairs, with the unknown pair first and
therefore appearing as the default. [...]


I don't understand who is meant by "pre-linked new person".

Ok, I think I've got it. The husband, to whom I was linking an existing
person as wife, already had his children entered. Legacy had therefore
already automatically entered an "Unknown" person as these children's
mother and the husband's wife. When I linked the wife to an existing
person I assumed I was filling in a blank, but it was not a blank: it
was an "Unknown", which for Legacy is a very different thing. Legacy was
adding the linked person's info to the Unknown person's info, so the
result was two sets of parents: the real parents and the Unknown
person's parents (who were obviously also unknown).

Tricky tricky.