Hello, I am havig trouble getting rid of the "unknown spouse". It gave me the same husband twice and when I tried to delete one of them I get the unknown. Too late now, but should I have used the 'merge' feature so as not to lose all the data etc? Thanks so much. Maxine

Yes, if you had merged them then all would have been fine, except that if the children were also duplicated, you would have had to merge each one of them. If they were the same individuals, listed as children of “both” families, merging the parent would have been all that was needed. There are at least two kinds of unknown spouses: One where you know there was a child, but you don’t know, so therefore do not enter any data for a second parent or marriage. And Two, where you enter a spouse, but use Unknown as the name. The first one shows up as a blank space on the screen, there are only two indicators to bring attention to this truly unknown spouse. A single parent will have descendants, or a married person will have an “Other spouses” indicator in the Family View. When you select the “Other spouses” button and one of the spouses is indicated as (UNKNOWN SPOUSE), that indicates that this is one the program put there so that the child would have the required two parents. Now, If after some searching, you find the name and or the marriage information on this unknown spouse, you cannot edit the blank unknown spouse, but you can either enter him/her as an unlinked individual in the database or if someone that is already entered, then link, as a spouse, to the real parent, or just add a new spouse for the single parent. You are asked if he/she belongs in the one parent family, then you say yes. Or, you find that you just want to get rid of that (UNKNOWN SPOUSE). Highlight the unknown spouse’s real spouse and go to the “Edit” menu, select “Unlink from” – “Spouse” and the spouse disappears, but, if there was a child, it is also unlinked from the real parent, so, you have to re-link to the real two parents, because if you re-link to only one parent, guess what, the (UNKNOWN SPOUSE) is back. Merge? If you find that you have two listings of the same individual and there is some unique information with each instance, then merge them into one and the resulting individual will have all the information. But, if one instance has him born in New York, New York, and the other has him born in New York, NY, you will find two birth facts. The Computer isn’t smart enough yet to know that they are the same place. It could be a good thing to have two birth facts if they are different, that way you can notice the difference and go searching for the right one. (Well, it’s better than having only one, the wrong one, entered!) This got to be a rather long dissertation, sorry about that, but, maybe someone can find something of value in here somewhere. (Someone else will probably find some errors too! <};-) Alfred ----- Original Message ----- From: "MMW" <genbug@olypen.com> > Hello, > I am havig trouble getting rid of the "unknown spouse". It gave me > the same husband twice and when I tried to delete one of them I get the > unknown. > Too late now, but should I have used the 'merge' feature so as not to > lose all the data etc? > Thanks so much. > Maxine >