Individual Appears Twice in Charts or Reports

When a person appears twice on a chart or twice in a report, and there are no duplicate records to merge, there are four possibilities:

1. If you descend from an ancestor through two of his children, the ancestor will appear twice on Pedigree Charts and in Ancestor Books. The solution is to click the Report Options button in the main report or chart screen; then in the Report Options screen click the Format tab and check mark "Don't repeat duplicate lines".

2. An individual can be married inadvertently to the same spouse more than once (same spouse RIN; but different MRINs). The solution is to open the Spouse List by clicking on View, then select Spouse List and choose either the husband or wife on the sub-menu.  Next, in the Spouse List highlight the duplicate marriage, and click Unlink on the right side of the window. The Unlink window is displayed.

This window shows the name of the current individual from whom the spouse will be unlinked along with a list of any children that are currently linked to these two people.  Where one linking has no children and the other has the children. unlink the one that doesn't have the children attached.  In this situation you can safely continue with the unlinking, and the children will remain linked to both of their parents. Only the superfluous marriage will disappear.

3. Occasionally a child may appear more than once in Family View in the Children's List under the parents' boxes. If the duplicated child has the same RIN number, then right click on the duplicate and select "Unlink from parents" on the popup menu.

4. Sometimes when Legacy searches for possible duplicates, it may not find them depending on what search options are selected. This can happen when if the information in two records varies enough in the spellings of given and surnames so that a normal duplicate search does not find them. Try experimenting with the search options. Or if you can find the duplicate records yourself in the Name List or Family View or whatever, write down the RIN numbers and then do a Manual Merge.