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Archiver > FAMILY-HISTORIAN-USERS > 2002-11 > 1037194276


From: "Simon Orde" <>
Subject: Re: [FHU] Merging / duplicates?
Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 13:31:16 -0000
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Julia

> In all honesty though, I find the whole FH merge routine rather
> unsatisfactory - it seems to want to merge the most unlikely of records,
> and on even my not very large file I spend ages selecting records and
> then clicking on discard. There must be a better way to do this,
> surely..

The Merge/Compare functionality is deliberately designed to err on the side
of making matches, if there is any chance that 2 people might be the same.
The reason for this is that it is relatively easy to look at 2 individuals
and decide that they are not the same person. But the opposite error is
much harder to correct. If F.H. failed to match 2 people who were in fact
the same, you would have to do a great many record comparisons to spot it.

The best solution is to click on the Match Score column to sort all matches
on Match Score. Then if you like (if you don't want to bother checking
them), you could simply select all records with
a match score under 100 and unmatch them all in one go. The centre and
right pane don't support multiple selection, but the left pane does, and
selections in this column can be used for Unmatching, Retaining and
Discarding (see "Multiple Selection" in Chapter 13 of the User Manual).

Incidentally, there is already on the Wish List a request from John Hanson
to allow users to append one file into another, without going through the
Merge/Compare process at all if you happen to know that there will be no
records in common. Also on the Wish List is the requirement to merge
individual records...

Simon Orde
List Administrator and Family Historian designer


----- Original Message -----
From: <>
To: <>
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 1:00 PM
Subject: RE: [FHU] Merging / duplicates?


> Nice to know I'm not the only one suffering from this one..
>
> Thanks for the suggestion Jane, but I can foresee far too many errors
> creeping into my data that way, but at least it is a solution.
>
> I must admit it was downloading gedcoms from IGI and Vital Records that
> started me on this too. I had never tried that before, and I don't know
> whether this new IGI system has made it more complicated but just trying
> to get rid of/merge 9 or 10 sets of duplicate parents made me very aware
> of this problem.
>
> In all honesty though, I find the whole FH merge routine rather
> unsatisfactory - it seems to want to merge the most unlikely of records,
> and on even my not very large file I spend ages selecting records and
> then clicking on discard. There must be a better way to do this,
> surely..
>
> As Jane says, the query tool is superb, but I really would like to be
> able to use just one program for my work, and not have to keep swapping
> data around.
>
> Is it worth anyone who has developed any really useful query ideas
> posting them on here to save us all reinventing the wheel? I'm quite
> willing to put the ones I have done up, they are not terribly exiting,
> but I've found them very useful.
>
> Julia
>
>
>
>
>
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