Interesting question. I don't know the answer, but I offer some logic to help you to experiment with a test merge to see what happens.
Family members are presumably just links to other individuals in the database, such as children, spouses, and parents. I would think, for a given individual that you are manually merging, that if the source file has a child and the target file does not have that child (yet), then the merge could not add that child until the individual record for the child is later encountered. Hopefully then the child will become properly linked to the previously merged parent. If the child had already been merged into the target file as an individual without linkage to the yet-to-be-merged parent, then I would also hope that the program is smart enough to bring in that linkage when the parent is merged. In the opposite case, where the target file has the child present and linked and the source file does not, I would expect the linkage to remain after the merge. This is not a problem, unless the author of the source file has determined that the child was a research mistake and really does not belong. I suspect that you can't do anything about that while merging the parent, but could make a note to delete or unlink the child later. The last time I merged files, I recall that I did end up with some unintended duplicate family members that I had to reconcile later. In other words, certain individuals matched and merged, while some of their family members did not match correctly with each other but did link to the individual. Fortunately, my files were not so very large and I was able to browse and detect the problems that I could not notice during the merge process. Ward ----- Original Message ----- From: Ron Goodwin To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 29, 2010 7:47 AM Subject: [LegacyUG] Merging Duplicate Records - Family Members I am in the process of merging two large Legacy files and I have a question on the actual merging process. I have gone through all the tabs; Events, Pictures, Notes, Research, etc and have copied the information I want to keep from the right individual file into my left individual file. But my question is in combining the “Family†tab. I know for sure that the two individuals are the same person, but I have family members in the left record that are not on the right side and others on the right side that are not in the left side. While it is very simple to copy the other tab records into the one I want to keep, I find that it isn’t so simple when it comes to family members. So my question is; if I hit “merge†at this point will all the family members on the right side that aren’t on the left but copied to the left record, or do I have to add them manually? I have checked the help file as well as the archives but I haven’t been able to clearly determine if Legacy automatically does this or not. Can anyone help? Thanks Ron Goodwin Canada Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
