>A cousin sent me a a bigger branch to my tree than I had. After >fooling with it for a while, I decided to just drag the branch over. I >expected to have to do some merges. >The useful thing I found was, where merging of parents caused >duplicate children (with no other links), I could just delete the >extra ones from the family view. VERY simple. There's nothing wrong with what you did, but I would still recommend a much less simple approach. I would recommend merging the duplicate children instead of deleting them. Merge them one-at-a-time (not automatically). I would also recommend carefully editing each child immediately after the merge. I tend to do merges with the keyboard rather than the mouse, and so my fingers sort of do an "M2" command automatically. The "M" is the keyboard way in the merge dialog to authorize the merge to proceed. The "2" command is the keyboard way to edit the "TO" person, who after the merge is the merged person. But if you prefer the mouse, you can click on Merge and then click on Edit To Person. Then, look for duplicate or redundant data and clean up. For example, you might have somebody born twice, once in 1950 in Oklahoma, and another time 3 June 1950 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. If you trust it, keep the more specific information and delete the less specific. To me, the problem (if there is one) of deleting the duplicate children is that you might accidentally delete some very useful information from one of the instances that would be retained by the merging technique. Also, if you have John W. Smith being merged with John William Smith, be sure that John William Smith is the TO person before the merge so that his middle name is retained. Finally (and this is much easier to do than to describe), the merge dialog has a very convenient way to pick other FROM/TO merge candidates from the same family. Look at the lower right quadrant of the screen and the GOTO mechanism. Jerry Bryan _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp