This is the simplest and most common kind of merging. It consists of merging two records into one. Suppose, for example, you discover that you have two Individual records for what is, in reality, the same person. You select both records and merge them. When you do this, Family Historian will take care of managing any links from or to either record. If person A was listed as a child in family F for example, and person B was listed as a spouse in family G, after the merge there will only be one record where there had been two, and the resulting person will be listed as a child in family F and as a spouse in family G.
You can merge records of any type with Basic Record Merging. For example, it sometimes happens that you find you have two source records for a single source, and you wish to merge them into one. You can use Basic Record Merging for this.
For more information about Basic Record Merging, see Basic Record Merging and Branch Merging.
Imagine that you have a record for one “Abe Smith” and another record for an “Abraham Smith”, and you discover that these two are in fact the same person. You could, of course, use Basic Record Merging to merge their records into one. But suppose, that Abe Smith and Abraham Smith are not the only two duplicates. You might discover that you also have duplicate records for their mothers, fathers, siblings, children, grandparents, cousins, and so on. It is surprisingly easy for these situations to arise. What should you do about it?
One option would be to take each pair of duplicate records in turn and merge them. That can be done. It is not necessarily the best or the easiest way of doing it, but it is one way of solving the problem. You should remember if you do this, that although most details about Individuals are stored in Individual records, details about family relationships (who is whose parent, spouse, child etc) are stored in Family records. So you would need to locate all of the duplicate Individual records and merge them. And you would also need to locate all the duplicate Family records and merge these too.
An easier alternative to merging the records one at a time is to use the Merge/Compare Dialog to help you locate a cluster of duplicated records and merge them all (or as many as you wish) in one go. This is called “Branch Merging”. Branch Merging is essentially the same as Basic Record Merging except that instead of merging just one pair of duplicated records, you can merge two entire branches of duplicated relatives. Branch Merging can only be used to merge Individual and Family records.
For more information about Branch Merging, see Basic Record Merging and Branch Merging .
File Merging is used where you have an entire file (or project) that you want to merge into your current file (or project). If merging two projects, it is really the GEDCOM files that are merged; but you can also merge 'standalone' GEDCOM files. If you only want to compare another file with the current file the procedure is the same except that you simply cancel at the end, instead of pressing the button.
There are two standard scenarios:
It often happens that you discover that another person has been doing research that overlaps with yours and you want to compare their research with yours, and possibly merge it in. That would be scenario (1).
It might also happen that you give a copy of your work to someone else to review and make corrections and additions. The file you are comparing/merging could be your own file, with these corrections and additions. That would be scenario (2). A variant on scenario (2) would be where two or more people collaborate to do research together and periodically merge the results of their work.
In both scenarios, you can compare the entire files and see exactly how they differ and where. In File Merging you can also treat the file being merged in as a source and create a record for it. New, updated or confirmed data can be given source citations which link it to this source record.
For more information about File Merging, see File Merging and Comparing.