Can a Person ID change?

[Keith Bage]

I am carrying out some rework on an old checklist I have, whereby I have a list of all births for a given surname and next to each entry I have marked the the person ID from Reunion which matches this person.

The problem I have is several instances where I had previously recorded the person ID no longer seem to match the Reunion person ID. Of course I could have written an incorrect number, but this has happened too many times for this to be the case in my opinion.

So, the question is. Can a Person ID change for a given entry in Reunion? And, if it can, what would cause this?

This makes me worried about how else Person ID might change. For instance, what happens to deleted people. Is their person ID re-used when a new entry is made?


It may well be time for me to start using the User ID field if Person ID is not robust.

Thoughts welcome.

Keith

[theKiwi]

The person ID is not changeable, except in this situation...

You delete a person, or you do a match and merge to get rid of a duplicate - which is in effect deleting a person.

So you now have a person ID that has no person attached to it.

The next person you enter, or import, will be assigned that currently empty person ID.

So it is possible that the name attached to a person ID can change to be something different than it had previously been.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Roger

[Keith Bage]

Thanks Roger, Thats how I thought it might work. However, as I alluded to, I seem to have a good number of ID's that have changed and I can't believe I deleted that many individuals. I'll have to keep a close eye on this. I could utilise the User ID, but don't like the manual approach to this which I'm sure would lead to more self inflicted errors.

Regards

Keith

[Gregg]

The only other possible way (that I can think of) that person ID numbers would change is if you imported your family file into another family file.

Upgrading per our instructions would not change the ID numbers - however, if you upgraded by importing your old family file into a new empty family file then some person ID numbers may be changed.

[Keith Bage]

Thanks, Gregg. I'm not sure that's something I've done, but I can't rule it out either.

It's good to know that there are few instances that should cause the personal ID to change.