Brothers marrying sisters

[Lalee]

I am sure some of you have come across two sisters marrying two brothers. I have this on my grandfathers maternal side of the family. As I worked on his mothers side, I already knew a bit  about them, I entered them on my tree. First his grand mother etc working on her maternal line and her aunts etc. Then I worked on her paternal line separately. Then I got some 'hints' and they fitted well.
It was only when I was showing the whole tree to my son I realised I had 'duplicated' my GGG aunt Sarah Mabbot and looked at her to merge them and realised the spouse names were different and she had married her sisters brother inlaw. Now I have her showing as two seperate people in different lines. Is this ok or should I merge her and If I do will I muddle up the in-law relationships.
Am I overthinking this.

[Pheno]

What program or online resource are you using?

Pheno

[KGarrad]

I would merge them!

I have a family of 5 men marrying 5 women from another family!
True they aren't all brothers and sisters (some are) but cousins. But it does lead to some complicated relationships!

[3sillydogs]

It does indeed.  This prompted me to go back and have a look at my tree, my dad's brother married my mum's sister and I have to now try and sort out what looks like a duplication, but in reality it isn't!!

[Lalee]

Thank you for your replies. I think this must be quite a common problem especially in fairly small communities  The thing is I don't want to lose the brother in law as my ggg uncle or my ggg aunt and end up with them as two in-laws who only married into the family when actually they are both blood relatives on either side.
Pheno, I am not using a specialist program, just keeping it on ancestry, but the information I have is from different sources, an old print of family search fiche and existing family info. I must admit using ancestry has helped me put relatives in the right place. There were lots of older cousins on my mothers side who were all called auntie, and It took a lot of sorting out before I joined and I do like the way it helps sort the generations out for me, but I just didn't spot the two marriages.

[Lalee]

It does indeed.  This prompted me to go back and have a look at my tree, my dad's brother married my mum's sister and I have to now try and sort out what looks like a duplication, but in reality it isn't!!

Oh sorry...didn't mean to make people have to do all that...just hoped there was a standard solution that everyone knew about except me. On paper I might just draw arrows and scribble a note. Don't know how to do that on the computer though.

[StevieSteve]

You should merge them as they are the same person.

Ancestry will treat her as two separate people on their diagrams. My specialist FH software would link them with a coloured "ribbon" and I imagine other software would show the link in some shape  or form

[Lalee]

Well I decided to take the plunge and merge them. Nothing too drastic happened except the actual aunt has shifted way over to join her husband on the other side, and that is only a problem because the next generation after them is so huge. Enormous families all round! The only real effort was removing all the duplicate children but not too bad as most of them were obvious by the dates. Unfortunately I had two lots of family names, and both lots seemed to use the same ones anyway, so that was a bit tricky as it merged the families with them. It probably is better that they are only on there once! But, overall the family groups were more clearly defined before because of so many children.

Inconsiderate, these ancestors of ours!

[3sillydogs]

Inconsiderate, these ancestors of ours!

But not to worry, our descendents will not have the same problem, we've got them all to sort out


Had a read up on my FH programme and I am going to follow the steps to remove the one pair that appears twice which I hope will solve the problem.  At the moment only the one pair appear twice, so I'm wondering what I did differently to do that.