How To work around a problem – Duplicate People on Tree

Problem: I get two images of the same person on my tree.

Query: How do I fix this?

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This problem and query was posted on a FaceBook group page and Eva had some screen prints to show what was happening.

Richard Austin was coming up in two places on her tree.

Anne, one of the members of the FB group commented:

Ancestry has explained this to me before. It’s a glitch in their program. Contact them for a better explanation.

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I commented:

Whenever you come across this glitch; seeing the same person twice on your tree; check your list of people before you panic.

I too ran into this and I too, started trying to remove one. Then I went into my list of people and saw that there was only one person with that name and dates, so I figured it was a program error and not a tree error.

To see your list do this:

Here is what you will see when you pull up the list of people

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After some back and forth comments with Eva;

I went into Ancestry dot com and  viewed her tree;

I opened the tree through different people.

I posted:

When I bring up the tree through their son Albert (notice his name box is black) I get the two people glitch; see Ida Austin is shown twice, but she is listed only once on person list. So you are not losing your mind.

It is just a glitch on how Ancestry shows you the tree. Depending on who you view, it will bring up a different pattern, especially if you have a large tree.

 

When I open up the tree thru Montag  (notice his name box is black), I only see one Ida Austin.

 

I also get the duplicate Ida when I view the tree thru Joseph Montag (notice his name box is black) (notice also that I altered the screen print so we could see Joseph on the screen.)

 

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Sometimes the problem is that you really do have three copies of a person on the tree, like this example.

Notice the two Sidney C Austin when I bring it up through James [he does not show up on the screen print]

The reason two Sidney’s show up was due to having three different instances of Elizabeth Brown; she appears on another part of the tree at the same time with the same dates.

when I delete two of the Elizabeth’s then the James tree view cleans up.

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Now you know how to view the problem and fix it if you find two or more copies of a person.

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I  hope this post will help you see the solution to the duplicate people problem.

Thank You