Ancestor jumped from one tree to other

Discussion in Technical Forum started by wendyem, Sep 12, 2019
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wendyem
I have a number of trees on Tribal Pages. My main tree is a paid site, the others are much smaller and free. Today I had two trees open at one. Somehow, a military ancestor jumped from one tree into the other and partially replaced my great grandmother. How could this happen? How can I fix it? I fear I've just lost a large amount of research. Help please!
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Blumstein
what a shame, that is too bad. First, to make sure it really did happen in the trees themselves, I would visit the trees in a different browser, one at a time, and see if they look okay or not. I have seen my browser get confused when I am logged in to different trees in different tabs.

It seems unlikely that people actually moved between your trees, but if they have, it is one very hard lesson learned, that at least for paid sites, it is wise to make backup gedcoms once in a while, in case something unexpected happens, so your data does not get lost.

IF you had backup gedcoms for both trees, which I realize you probably do not, but if you did, then I would take the bad data from one gedcom and import it into the other. It could be done either by hand or thru use of a family tree program on your computer.

Let us know if your grandmother actually disappeared, or it was simply a matter of your browser getting confused. This sort of confusion can happen if TP's cookies apply to all tabs and are not written in such a way that you can log in to two trees at the same time without a problem. The issue is not unique to TP - I think browsers in general seem to access one cookie file for all tabs together and do not keep separate cookie files for each tab.

The best way to avoid this sort of situation is to only log in to one of your trees at a time in any given browser, and open a different browser if you want to visit another tree here, as that will keep it's own separate cookie file. I do NOT mean a second session of the same browser, I mean two different browsers like Chrome and Firefox, or Safari and Edge. One tree per browser at a time.