Another technique that sometimes eliminates a lot of hand work is to form your own key with whatever is available in the database you have, e.g. lastname & phone, or perhaps just phone, almost anything that is almost unique will cut down the list that you have to do by individual lookup. I did such a match on just lastname&zipcode and cut the number of special cases from 7000 down to a few hundred. Most were matched by the simple key uniquely. The rest included some really hard cases, e.g. people whose name had changed (worst) or merely moved (not too bad). You can also create a special purpose layout that shows you a bunch of possible candidate matches in a portal. We had a bunch of duplicate names where a person was in the database as themselves and as a member club officer. The problem was that over the years, the club dues got recorded to whoever was an officer at the time. We decided to cleanup the mess and create a club record to contain the club dues payments and the problem was finding all the payments and moving them. Portals showed up most of the problems and allowed a fairly quick solution.
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