Merging Individuals

From SharedTree Wiki

I would really like someone with extensive merging experience to rewrite this page.

Merging is actually made up of two activities: matching and merging.

Matching

Matching is the process of identifying to individuals as the same person. This is usually done by matching on name and time period and then confirming with other data such as parents, spouses, children, and other events. Matching is difficult for several reasons:

Name spelling variations makes it hard to find the two matches at all
Lack of information makes it sometimes impossible to reliably confirm a possible match
People are often named after family members including children named after a deceased sibling

For these reason, SharedTree does not attempt to actively match individuals. The exception to this rule is after a merge. If you merge two individuals that have different parents. We will automatically add the fathers and the mothers to the merge review list with a score of 2 (highest score possible). If the person is married to a person with exactly the same name, then Willow will add the spouses to the list with a score of 2 as well. If both people were married to the same person and they had children with exactly the same name, then those children will also be added to the review list. This process actually helps facilitate very fast merging of imported family trees.

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Merging

Once two individuals are identified as matches, a user has the choice to then match those individuals. When merging we strictly abide by the Older Record Principle.

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