I now understand these problems that I found in my tree.
**RESTRICTION SIGN ISSUE**
I spotted that AdBlock was enabled on my Browser - Ancestry or AdBlock or both have had an interaction on some erratic basis - turning off AdBlock has solved the problem. It was weird how the restriction sign appeared erratically.
Maybe one some of the Ancestry chosen Content Distribution Network (CDN) solution was in the knowledge scope of AdBlock,... images maybe were being served up at different times from different parts of the CDN solution ... hmmm
** DUPLICATION ISSUE **
Essentially after 20+ years some individuals have ended up with multiple parents. Ancestry Web Tree View (ie via a web browser) lets you see these through multiple parents the persons "Profile">"Edit this Person" > "Relationships" tab.
FamilyTreeMaker (FTM) doesn't let you see multiple parents, which is what I normal use...
You would hope that it is then an easy fix - simply select one parent as the biological and it will be fixed - but it isn't.
If you have merged up and added lots of information over a period of time (decades in my case) you have these metadata anomalies. We now run into children from these people with multiple parents and they have on occasion multiple parents. This becomes really complicated if people have re-married and children have ended up with multiple biological parents because research you have used hasn't know which parent is the biological ones!
If you should start trying to solve the problem at the earliest person - I found that created multiple editions of sub generations and the problems just got worse. I believe that currently there are safeguard checks in place to not allow you to create some of these situations, but they are only in the last few years.
I am still fighting my way through the tree, but I have found that the best approach is to merge up any duplicate children of the most recent generations where they are obvious, de-parent as seems reasonable any multiple parent issues and then track back in time. Iteratively taking out multiple parent sets as you find then and then going through a loop of merging because this process spawns more individuals sometimes! ...
Four asks of Ancestry/FTM please:
What is needed to fix this properly is an "integrity validation tool" that knows about some of these complications and leads you through the process of spotting people who have mis-configured parents and semi-automatically (ie with the mk1 eye ball involved to check) invokes the repetitive merge processes. It might operate a bit like the Hints tools? Maybe
This integrity tool could also spot impossible dates for you, such children being born before mothers or fathers were capable of reproducing or were dead (allowing ~9-10 months for those very sad situations of a father dying before child is born).
Please can FTM be developed to give you a way to see multiple parents. The Ancestry Web Tree view is pretty well hidden so you have to recognise the issue and then drill through to find the multiple parents list - and start the above process.
Lastly please can the merge tool be made available on the Quick Edit and Profile Screen with the option to select multiple people to compare and merge. The Merge screen offers you usually a good set of matches, its a shame you have to iterate around and around.
Many thanks
James Usmar