A picture is worth 1000 words. I've put a screen shot that shows the results of merging 3 files together, which was done in FTM Mac 1. Note in the Children part of the screen, there are mysterious exact duplicates. e.g. Daniel Mathis b. 1723. Note that such duplicates DO NOT appear in the Index list of people on the LHS. There are 3 Daniel Mathis', but only one b. 1723. I haven't found the tool, nor discovered what went wrong in the merge to produce these "shadow" people. But it seems that the multiples come from the number of files that they were in, and were net handled properly during the merge of known people that I did. I did export to GEDCOM, a month ago, and concluded that each of these shadow people have one GEDCOM person entry, but multiple GEDCOM linkage records. If I read the GEDCOM correctly. Does anyone know what caused this, how to prevent it, and/or how to fix this corrupted file? [customer service hadn't a clue as to what I was even getting at and I had to unceremoniously end talking to the wall] The picture: http://jytangledweb.org/work/bug.png Thanks, John