Geni.com How do you unmerge an ancestor that has been merged?

-You will have to communicate with the owners of the site.

I went there, and see several things...one, they seem to encourage merging of files, and they seem proud that you can invite people to add/edit your file. And, they allow posting of data re living persons, although they claim you can control privacy settings.

All of the above ARE RISKY to good genealogy. I would not touch that site with a 10 ft pole. And yes, I have merged files in the past and dealt with the nightmare it causes. I learned the hard way.

IF they allow you to download the info as a gedcom, do that. Grab a copy of PAF from the LDS site, and put that gedcom in there. Rename it something like whoops.ged, so you can tell it from the good file that you can recreate. You can then delete the entire file from geni.

Once you have the file on your system, go in and delete the bad linking person. You will still have the connected data, but it won't connect to your "good" stuff. You can now create a new file with PAF on your system. PAF allows you to make new gedcoms, AND you can pick/choose the "root" person, and his/her relatives to include. I encourage you to do this in small batches, such as one for each grandparent.

If you go through this process, it will pay immensely to review any of your information as to which you actually have solid documentation for. Any "files" downloaded where someone else has done the work, is subject to errors. YOUR file can be one file, and it can contain any number of persons/ lines, even if they are not linked. In other words...you can import the file for each grandparent, the data will be in one file, but they don't have to be connected by you or parents.

As you clean the file, my advice is to keep it on your own system at home. This way, no one else has access to mess it up, or enter data that you may disagree with.Do you want the bad news or the really bad news?



:-)