Wes, You don't want to merge the "evidence persons," the "personas", into your conclusion records. As you say, you can do this today with any of today's programs. When you merge you loose the integrity of your evidence. The "personas" should be permanent, as they are the codification of your evidence. There is some issue of how you "inherit" information from the personas up into the conclusion records, but this has been discussed and there are solutions. Also note that one can handle two-level trees (personas are grouped into conclusion persons) or one can imaging many-tier trees with many levels. An exmaple of the multi-tiered approach from my own data comes from a person who is found in a series of city directories of Norwich, Connecticut, and a series of city directories in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. These records all started out as independent personas in my database, one created from each city directory entry. When I concluded that all the ones from Norwich were the same person I created a conclusion person with those personas as "leaves" in a conclusion tree. When I decided all the ones form Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, were the same person, I created a conclusion person from them. Then later, when I decided that the Connecticut man and the Nova Scotia man were one and the same I created a third conclusion person from the two earlier conclusion records. Now I have a three-tiered structure of records and conclusions that exactly match 1) the data I have found; 2) the conclusions I have made from that data; and 3) properly structured conclusion persons holding my best inferences. This is frankly beautiful. Tom Wetmore