Thanks for any help that you can give.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=fell&GSfn=arlin&GSbyrel=all&GSdyrel=all&GSob=n&GRid=32920360&df=all&

http://worldconnect.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=AHN&db=vjm9044&id=I3576

I am new to all this but finding it very intersting and apperciate the community spirit amongst people on here 

Taking as an example a child who is the focus of a family tree, the childs unrelated mother and father both appear in the childs tree.

When you follow the fathers line back over 20 generations, and also the mother back over 20 generations you then reach a shared ancestor who appears in both the father and mothers trees, and hence twice in the childs tree. On the basis that all humans are interconnected via common ancestors... IF all family trees could be traced back in the order of 20 generations, then a shared ancestor for a present-day husband and wife would be a relativley common occurance. If trees were traced back further, in the order of 40-50 generations, shared ancestors would be shown to be even more  common.

In my example of the child whose parents are "unrelated" (unrelated by usual modern standards of defining relatives) the parents have more than one shared/common ancestor.  Assume the childs parents share not only Ancestor X (20 generations back), but also Ancestor Y (30 generations back) and Ancestor Z (35 generations back). So we now have 3 instances of the branches of the childs tree -connecting- at some distant past point (high up in the childs tree).

In other words from the childs father we had split into two branches and again to his two parents, and in turn four branches to their parents (the childs great-grandparents), and so on; and we did the same on the mothers side of the tree, occurances of ancestor X, Y, and Z  appear twice in the childs tree, each time on different sides (fathers side, mothers side) of the childs tree.

Question = Is it possible using  Family Tree Builder and MyHeritage to show that the two occurances in the childs tree of Ancestor X are linked, that they are the same person. Obviously the two entries in the tree of Ancestor X have the same name and same birth and death dates, but they are meer entry points within a large tree, how is it possible to identify that "X" on one side, and "X" on the other side of the tree is the exact same person, so that a casual reading of the complex tree reveals this fact?

Shared ancestors X, Y, and Z, occurring twice on a tree is just the start of the duplication issue. In turn the parents and grandparents and so on, of X, and Y, and Z will be duplicated on either side, so having a way of directing the flow up seperate sides of a tree back into a single shared point and then upwards through a single occurance of that shared ancestry will reduce enetering on the childs tree multiple duplicate entries of various ancestors.

What is the standard way of dealing with this issue? 

I really apprecaite any guidance on this, I suspect that it is a common issue within geneaology and if there is a standard way of dealing with this problem that is not available on Family Tree Builder I would find that useful as it would enable me to avoid mass duplications of ancient ancestors.

Thank you Jak 

(P.S. When I search the forums and help pages I find many ways to merge the information and profile data for a person on a new tree where that same person is already appearing on someone elses tree, thats not relevant to my question, that covers sharing reasearch when two trees include one person, my question is about one person, appearing twice in one tree).