Jerry Bryan

I'm going to ask everyone to be really nice to me and don't add your wishes if you already know they have been asked and added to the enhancement list before. 

Well, I think that surely the RM developers could embrace item #1 on my list!    More seriously, I have created a list of well over 100 wish list items that I won't post. I sort of curated and prioritized my big list to come up with my Baker's Dozen list of most important items. I suspect that most if not all of the Baker's Dozen list have appeared before. So I posted the Baker's Dozen list primarily to express my preferred priorities.

Jerry

I think that in your situation, the best strategy would be to start over. But I wouldn't start over from scratch. I would choose one of the ancestry files - whichever one seems to be in the best shape, and use TreeShare to transfer it to RM. I would then cleanup that RM database. Finally, I would manually look at the other ancestry databases for information that might otherwise be missing. I would enter that information into my now one and only RM database, but I wouldn't merge any of the other ancestry databases in any sort of automated fashion. I would just use them for reference. Finally, I would disconnect my RM database from ancestry. I would either just leave it that way, or else use TreeShare to make make a new ancestry tree.

So I would have a new standalone RM database or else a new RM database  + a new linked ancestry tree. At that point, I would either leave the other ancestry trees there for occasional reference or else I would just delete them. This sounds like a drastic solution, but I think it's the only sort of thing that's likely to really work.

Jerry

Wonderful !!!!

Being on the enhancement request list is not a commitment to include the request in the product. Most of the items on the enhancement request list never seem to make it into the product.

Jerry

Doesn't the Treeshare download require you to add each and every person -- ie 20K in this case

Not on the initial download. The manual sync process takes over for any changes after the initial download.

Jerry

You are not going to like this solution, but when I first begin genealogy a very wise and experienced genealogist mentored me to the effect that in genealogy women are always known by their birth name. It's obviously less common, but the same approach works with men who takes the names of their wives. So just leave your son's name unchanged. Simple solution. Problem solved.

It's probably worth documenting the name changes in notes in RM. And you will probably have documents for your son where his name appears in a changed form. So images of those documents will have his name in changed form as will any transcriptions of those documents. But as far as the actual name field in RM itself, just leave it alone. Some RM users will enter Alternate Names in this kind of situation, and that can be a good solution as well. Just leave his birth name alone.

Jerry