singhals <[email protected]> wrote: >Have you been shown the members-only part of the >newfamilysearch databases? If you have not, I /urge/ you to >find a Mormon who will show you his own family there. >They eschewed the notion of "merge" for the more seductive >"combine" which, frankly, works no better than "merge" in >the hands of the hurried except that with "combine" you can >sometimes see who last did what. And... except that the source personas that went into the merge are not destroyed, and... that it is possible to uncombine, or to extract multiple personas from a combined record (indeed this is vital for some of the "combined" monstrosities of the 18th century and earlier, some of which have a half dozen names, a half dozen different parents and a half dozen different spouses, all contradictory, and 50 different birthplaces because a lot of non-standardized locations were in the various personas that were "combined"). >The results of that push me deeper into a belief that you've >got to plump for Yes it is/No it isn't at some point and >that point may as well be now, since you're never going to >get proof-absolute or even *all* potentially pertinent data >(since as has been said here before, data has the >uncomfortable habit of popping up where it has no earthly >reason to be ...). I have several times in the new-LDS data said "yes it is" and then had to go back a few days later and undo, because I found evidence that "no it is not". I have also had to extract a few sources that have been "combined" from a monstrosity. It is not hard to do directly, but it has to be done on the site - the Legacy interface that I use for most of my work does not support separations from a combined record (though one can extract individual data elements from a record to one's Legacy tree persona and then add that persona as a new one to the LDS data - that is generally a pain to do, though). lojbab --- Bob LeChevalier - artificial linguist; genealogist [email protected] Lojban language www.lojban.org