Easy trick for merging identities on Family Tree Maker

Ever see names kind of stack up in the index of Family Tree Maker? Then you take a look and see that some are duplicates--same person listed several times. You want to see all relationships possible--all the children of all these parents.

Example: You've listed Joe Martin as father of Jeremiah Martin. Elsewhere you have him as father of Lisette Martin. You want to see all siblings listed under the same father (Joe), which you have suddenly noticed is the same for both kids. This is very helpful in any genetic matching or in family tree matching. Maximum info=maximum results with minimum effort.

Ordinary merges take time and attention to details such as birth and death dates.

Simpler is this method-choose a special letter, such as "t" to temporarily attach to the ends of the names of the mergers. Appelman becomes Appelmant temporarily. His merge also becomes Appelmant. You merge the two Applemants, without having to sort them out from any other Appelmans in your file. Once they have merged, you remove the "t" ending and voila--a quick merge. Very useful with common names such as David Johnson or Sarah Brown.

Finding that common ground--literally-- for the DNA connection

Those of us who are pursuing autosomal DNA matching to give us an edge in our paper trail chases find that sometimes it's easy, and most of the time it's very hard, to make that connection with another person's family tree.

It is going to get easier, as more matches appear and their trees start matching up to one another.

In the meantime, while we work hard to extend the trees of the matches beyond what even they even guessed were there ancestors, and while we speculate at what might be that common ancestor, one angle to take is the geographical one.

If I look at a match's tree, I might see two areas where I could follow the lines to connect to a potential ancestor. I can't really ignore any possibilities, because people were mobile, and we may have ancestors from places we don't know they hailed from. But while keeping that in mind, I can extend the trees in the directions most likely to prove fruitful in a geographical sense. And as I do so, I check back to the trees of other matches, and check their chromosome browser results against each other, and see if there might be a location that makes sense, at least for the moment. Then I take a good look at my tree, and, keeping it all in mind, I begin to see at least where the possible match might be.

Family Tree Maker is very helpful for this exercise, because I can click on "places," choose a location, such as Somerset, New Jersey, and have all the ancestors, or ancestors of matches, I have listed to date show up in a list. I can then investigate via the census to see just how close they may have lived to one another, and then I can further check for marriages and land exchanges to see which families were linked to others. 

Just one way to make a little, or a lot, if you are lucky, of progress.

Happy hunting!