Fixing the Gender in my Family Tree Maker File

I think I may have found a glitch in the Family Tree Maker 2014 (Ancestry version) software program. While running a Kinship report, I found two individuals that were showing as grandchild instead of grandson or granddaughter.

When I looked at the record in the person view, they should the proper gender.

However, when I view them from the edit screen, the gender shows up as Unknown.

Normally, I would just click on the down arrow and change the selection from Unknown to male or female; however it was not staying as my choice.

I thought I would try to change the gender back on the person view to unknown and then change it on the edit view, but that didn’t work either.

Finally, I created a new stand-alone, unrelated person with the same name as my problem person, making sure I specify the gender properly.

While still having my unrelated individual selected, I selected Person – Merge Two Specific Individuals and I select the problem person. This way the problem person facts merge into my new unrelated person.

This fixed my gender problem. I don’t know how this glitch came into my database. I must admit this is a project database, where I have been creating it through the Ancestry side of things and then syncing to Family Tree Maker. Normally I don’t add people this way. Normally, I manually add each individual on Family Tree Maker and then manually had all my facts and source citations. I would then sync back to Ancestry.

However on this project database, I have been following the shaky leafs and evaluating if they belong to the person in the database and if they do, I will merge the fact into my database. Perhaps the glitch is on Ancestry’s side and it created the two individuals improperly.  The only common source citation these two people had were Find A Grave records from Ancestry.com.

What I learned from all of this; is confirmation that by manually adding each individual, each fact and each source citation seems to keep glitches out of my “real” databases. It is a minor inconvenience in my project database but could had been a major annoyance had it been my “real” database. Then again, perhaps I better check my other databases and see if I have any unknown gender where I do know the gender.