merging people

[barbsnow]

I can't believe I can't figure this out, but here I am...

I have two families in my file. I just figured out that individuals in each are the same, so I want to merge 1) the husband 2) one of the wives and 3) a child --abbreviated first names of all three show up on one record, more complete name information on another. I merge the husband by dragging the husband of one record onto the other.

When I try to check the merge selected box, so I can also merge a wife and child, no check mark will appear and the wife and son get added as duplicates.

What am I doing wrong?

Barbara Snow
Ann Arbor, Michigan

[A Hougie]

Re: I can't get merge selected groups to work

I try and amend the names on both sets of records so that they are identical (and in the form I want) before I Merge. Having discovered the hard way that Merge operations can go wrong, I also:
* back up my reunion data before doing any Merge operation; and
* get into the habit of merging individuals separately (particularly where a family has more than one child as sometimes Reunion Merges the wrong children), rather than relying on Merge to deal with a whole family.

In this case, it may be that the names of the spouse and child are too different for Reunion to recognise them as matching?

[Mark]

Re: I can't get merge selected groups to work

When I try to check the merge selected box, so I can also merge a wife and child, no check mark will appear and the wife and son get added as duplicates.

What am I doing wrong?

You're not doing anything wrong - because of the differences in the information for these two entries, Reunion doesn't consider them matches and so doesn't give you the option to merge them when merging the husband.

One solution to this is simply to merge those entries the same way you merged the husband (after you finish merging the husband).

HTH