Johannes Wilhelm Welsch
RIN 10822- Born
- 1719
- Parents
- Hans Welsch
- Children
- 2 recorded
- Photos
- 7 attached
Every tree that has ever been merged, imported, or shared has duplicates buried in it. Cleaning them up by hand is a weekend you will not get back — and one wrong merge quietly takes a photograph, a child, or a source with it.
FamilyTreeCleaner finds them, shows you the evidence, and merges them without losing anything. On your own computer.
Works on your RootsMagic file. Never touches the original.
Measured on a real 31,000-person tree, not a demo file. The cleaned copy opens and closes in RootsMagic 11 without complaint.
Nothing happens to your tree until you say so. When it does happen, it is written down and it is reversible.
Your live RootsMagic file is opened read-only and copied. Every piece of work happens on the copy, so the tree you use every day cannot be damaged by anything here.
Each suspected duplicate is shown as two records side by side — parents, spouses, children, dates, sources, photo counts. You decide. The obvious ones are grouped so you can clear them in a keystroke.
Approved merges are written to the copy along with a journal of every change. Undo replays that journal and puts the file back exactly as it was — verified byte for byte.
For the researcher with thirty years and thirty thousand people in it
For professional genealogists and researchers doing this for a living
Both tiers include the AI second opinion. Neither is metered by the hour or priced by the size of your tree.
One researcher, your own trees
A tree of 30,000 people typically needs a few hundred second opinions to work through. Top-ups available if you use them up.
Genealogists cleaning clients' trees
Roughly five large trees a month of heavy AI use. Overage is sold in blocks — we would rather meter it than pretend it is free.
Prices are what we intend to launch at. Early testers get in before that, and keep their price.
Any tool can merge two records. The work is in knowing when not to, and in never destroying evidence on the way through.
Two people with the same name, one generation apart, is the classic bad merge. If the records are related to each other, it stops and tells you why.
Records married to each other are never the same person, however alike the names look. Same for two records with opposite recorded sex.
When the records genuinely conflict, both facts are kept and flagged for you. A tool that silently picks one has destroyed the evidence you needed to judge it.
Merging re-points every attachment onto the surviving record. Across 199 merges on a real tree, not one photograph, child link, or citation was lost.
No. FamilyTreeCleaner works on your local RootsMagic file and nothing else. If you want the cleaned result to reach Ancestry, you push it yourself through RootsMagic's own TreeShare, in your own time, reviewing what goes.
They clean different files. Pro Tools works on your tree as it sits on Ancestry's website. FamilyTreeCleaner works on the RootsMagic file on your own computer — which, for most RootsMagic users, is the copy they treat as the real one. Syncing the two is also where a fair share of duplicates come from in the first place.
Then there is undo. Every change here is written to a journal and can be replayed backwards to restore the file exactly, and all of it happens on a copy of your tree, so nothing you do is a one-way door. It is worth checking what any tool offers you there before you let it merge anything: an undo you can rely on is worth more than a merge you cannot take back.
They are not really rivals. Plenty of people will use both.
They stay exactly where they are on disk. A merge re-points the links so the surviving person keeps every image both records had — the files themselves are never moved, renamed, or deleted.
Every change is written to a journal as it happens. Undo replays that journal and restores the file exactly — we verify it byte for byte on every release. And you are working on a copy, so the original is always there as the final backstop.
No. It runs on your computer. The optional AI second opinion is off unless you turn it on, and even then it sends only an anonymized summary of the two records being compared — no names of living people, no photos, no documents, never the tree.
Yes, though not because of us. A RootsMagic file is a live database, and sync services upload files while they are being written — that is how trees get corrupted, or quietly forked into a second copy with your computer's name on it. It is a common situation rather than a careless one: Windows offers to back up Documents to OneDrive when you set the machine up, and RootsMagic saves new databases in Documents. FamilyTreeCleaner spots it and tells you, works on its own copy so the session is safe either way, and can save your cleaned tree to a local disk while leaving your photographs exactly where they are.
Your copy keeps working, and there is no expiry date on it. FamilyTreeCleaner reads the version out of each file and tells you what it sees — if it meets a format it has not been proven against, it says so rather than guessing, and it will not write to a structure it does not recognize. If a future RootsMagic changes the file format enough to need real work, supporting it may be a paid upgrade. Fixes and improvements for the version you bought are free.
RootsMagic, on Windows. Tested on RootsMagic 11 and RootsMagic 9, with trees of about 30,000 people. FamilyTreeCleaner reads the version out of your file and tells you what it finds, so you are never guessing — and it refuses to write to a file whose structure it does not recognize. If you use something else, tell us what: it decides what we support next.
The engine is built and proven on real trees. What it needs now is people with messy, complicated, thirty-year-old trees willing to point it at a copy and tell us what happens.
If that's you — hobbyist or professional — get in touch and we'll bring you in as testing opens up.