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I want to delete a person and clean up references

646 words·4 mins
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Use this when you’ve discovered a duplicate entry, received incorrect family information from a relative, or otherwise need to remove a person from your tree. Charted Roots doesn’t have a one-click “Delete with cleanup” action, but the two-step workflow — delete the note, then sweep for orphaned references — is straightforward and safe. By the end the person is gone, all relationship fields pointing at them are cleaned up, and no broken wikilinks remain.

What you’ll need
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  • The person note(s) you want to remove.
  • A few minutes after the deletion to run the orphan-references cleanup. Best done after all your deletions for the session, not after each one.

Steps
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1. (Recommended) Check backlinks before deleting#

In Obsidian, open the person’s note and use the Backlinks panel (right sidebar) to see what currently references them. This is a sanity check — large numbers of backlinks mean lots of cleanup work; very few means a clean delete.

If the backlinks include important content you don’t want to lose (e.g., research notes that mention them in passing, source notes that name them), consider whether you really want to delete or whether merging into another record would preserve more.

2. Delete the person note
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In the file explorer, right-click the person note → Delete (or select it and press the Delete key). Obsidian moves the file to its trash. Repeat for any other notes you’re deleting in this session.

3. Open the Cleanup Wizard
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Control Center → Data Quality tab → Cleanup Wizard. Or via command palette → Charted Roots: Post-import cleanup wizard.

4. Run the orphan-references step
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Step through (or jump directly to) Clear Orphan References. Click Scan. The wizard finds all father_id and mother_id values that point to non-existent people and lists them.

5. Review and fix
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Read the list of orphan references. For each entry, the wizard shows the person whose frontmatter contains the dangling reference and which property is affected. Click Fix All to remove the orphan references, or fix them individually if you want to verify each.

6. Verify
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Re-open the file explorer and any tree canvases that included the deleted person. Trees should regenerate cleanly without the deleted node. The Backlinks panel on related people should no longer reference the deleted note’s basename.

Variations
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  • Batch deletions. Delete all the notes you want to remove first, then run the cleanup once. Faster than deleting + cleaning up after each one, since the orphan scan runs against the whole vault each time.
  • Restoring a deleted note. Obsidian’s trash holds deleted files until you empty it. If you delete by mistake, restore from the trash before running cleanup. If you’ve already run cleanup, the orphan references are gone too — restoring the note doesn’t restore the relationship references that pointed at it.
  • Periodic sanity check. The orphan-references step is also useful as a periodic sweep during active research, even when you haven’t deliberately deleted anything. Note renames or accidental deletions can leave orphans you didn’t notice.
  • Events and sources. Deleting a person doesn’t automatically delete their event notes or source notes. Review those separately — orphan event notes (events whose primary person was deleted) and source notes that named the deleted person are still in your vault. The Cleanup Wizard’s other steps cover some related cleanup; for full event/source review, browse the relevant folder or filter the events/sources tabs in Control Center.

Related guides#

Reference
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