Bad Merge - How to undo?

Laura Jean Barlow.

There is no "unmerge". Depending upon how many profiles are affected, manually doing an unmerge can be a bit challenging. If it only affects the one profile, then create a sibling and transfer any relevant field or About Me information that should be in the sibling profile. Then detach the sibling profile and attach it where it needs to be or have the other manager do the reattachment. Can you post a link to one of the merged profiles?

You may want a curator's help if there are a lot of relationships to be cut and reattached elsewhere.

There are thousands of profiles attached to the bad merge profile. How do I get a curators's help?

Post in this thread: http://www.geni.com/discussions/133231

As long as the merge itself doesn't involve many profiles, it can be "undone". And you can work with the curator(s) to learn how to undo a bad merge without damaging the other (merged) profile.

How do I contact a curator?

If you post in the discussion thread that I provided a link to above, a curator will respond.

Isn't it about time you made the unmerge feature available to basic users? We are after all your bread and butter; happily providing the information that you then sell on to the Pro users. At the moment I've got a handful of Pro user clowns who are spreading havoc in my tree; happily merging persons with the same name, completely ignoring basic facts such as different names of parents, different countries of origin etc. etc. As a basic user there's not a lot I can do about it. I find that I waste a lot of time trying to contact these users (to no avail) and otherwise trying to do undo their work. Having access to the unmerge feature would be a big help.

Private User

The unmerge tool, available to curators, is still a bit funky

- it is only effective for merges "after" August 2014 (a database upgrade date)
- it may still require disconnects, moves, additional merges, new profiles, research, etc to complete tree repair

That said - I do think there is a hope / intent to make it more widely available at some point, but what that "point" might be I wouldn't say.

Please do avail yourself of curator assistance, we aim to please.

Whoa! I think it is majorly better to have unmerge just be done by the Staff and Curators - but, as now, equally available to Pro and Basic User. There are enough edit battles - do we really want merge-unmerge battles?

Erica, I was under the impression that an unmerge option was available to Pro users, but not basic users. How do I get the curators to help out?

Lois, trust me, I've got other 'managers' in my tree who are ready to assume that anyone named James who happens to be born in the 19th century must be one and the same person; "press merge!". Other 'managers' will merge profiles and then switch the merged profile to 'private', barring everyone else access. A bit of merge/unmerge battling will be a lot less frustrating than the current state of affairs.

http://www.geni.com/discussions/142108
"Attention curators please assist"

(assistance from non curators welcome also)

- merge undo is a curator only tool at this point

- wikipedia as example has robust revert tools, for admins. By analogy then a profile manager is the admin for that profile, so if / when / how "undo" is more available on Geni ... I don't know how they would work thru permissions v subscription levels

- since I spend a great deal of time (manually) UN merging (old, un merge tool won't work) merges, and an undo merge can always be re merged ... Yah, I'd live with a few "merge wars.".

:)

Private User - re: "Other 'managers' will merge profiles and then switch the merged profile to 'private', barring everyone else access." --

if the Profile (or any of its managers) is within your Max Family - ie out to fourth cousin, back to 3rd Great-Grandfather - then switching the Profile to Private will NOT bar access to it.
[nor will it bar access to anyone else for whom that is the case]

I meant 3rd Great-Grandparent (does NOT have to be male) - my goof!

Lois, in my case the 'fun' starts prior to the third generation grandparents; whole branches of my tree greyed out in <private>s. Some of these includes direct ancestors. I'm on my third year of trying to get through to the person responsible.

Morten - that's something curators should be able to help with. Feel free to send me a personal message, with a link to profile, and I can advise from there.

If the connection on Geni has these as direct ancestors, and closer than 3rd Great-Grandparents (or as other relatives, at 4th cousin or closer) - and they are grayed out to you - Then that is a BUG. The problem is not that the manager has marked them as Private - ie the person responsible" is NOT the manager of the Profiles who marked them as Private.

Would suggest - first make sure you have Family Group set to the Maximum allowed, since I am not sure what affect setting it closer might have. Then --

As a Basic Member, you cannot contact Customer Service or Open a Ticket. But you can report the Bug over in Help (in "Bug Reports") - have you done so?

Ah - Erica and I cross-posted. She can definitely confirm what relationship Geni shows between you and those folks and then advise you from there - strongly suggest -- take her up on her suggestion.
(if you cannot get link to a grayed out one, get a link to a child or sibling or whatever is close to a grayed out area that you do have access to, and provide her with the relationship/patj to the grayed out one(s) so she can find one or more of the grayed-out ones).

Yes, thank you, Lois. It sounds like Morten's tree got itself attached to a zombie tree, which is a kind of bug -- often originating from a GEDCOM upload error -- and curators have tools to fix that. But I cant be sure without looking at it.

Hi Erica, I've send you a private mail with the links to the various private profiles. Big thanks to both you and Lois for helping out.