> WHY would I want to keep them separate once I've decided > they're the same person? My bc, my mc, and my son's bc all > refer to ME as ME; what would be the POINT of keeping ME in > there 3 times? > > Cheryl Cheryl, You don't have yourself three times. You have yourself once. You just have separate records, if you want, for your birth, marriage, residence, and your own record refers to these. I know you think this doesn't make any sense with respect to yourself or your parents or grandparents or great grandparents. Nobody does. That it would even be crazy. You have to get over the hurdle of thinking about the people you know and the people it is easy to find by following a clear trail of vital records or census records or similar records. These problems with evidence only come to the fore when you are far enough back, and into the realm of uncertainty, that when you find evidence about people with names you might be interested in, you don't know enough yet whether the people really are the people you are looking for. That is the evidence that has to be worried about. There is no person in your database you can add that information to, because you haven't figured out who the people are yet. Say you have found 400 records like this. The question I am asking is what are you going to do with those 400 items of evidence so you can quickly search them, arrange them, and use them to help you make your conclusions about who the people really were?" We have gotten some very good answers to that question on this thread. I have my own preferred answer, which is just one of many that are being described here. My answer is to create persona records for each item of evidence and add those persona records to my database. Then when I decide that one of those persona records really does refer to one of the persons I am interested in I make the record of that person refer to that persona record. I don't want to merge the data in for two very good reasons: 1. I might be wrong and want to undo the merge. Undoing a merge is very messy, especially after multiple merges have happened. 2. I want the persona to be a codified representation of the real evidence. I want it to be a record in my database that contains exactly and only the information about a person that came from one item of evidence. There are many programs that allow you to create all the persona records you want in the guise of extra person records. Basically all of them. But when you decide that two of your records are the same person you HAVE to merge them. Well, the only exception I am aware of is the New Family Search Tree, that explicitly supports personas and persons. So you have the multiple persona records as the result of difficult research and not wanting to muddle your evidence. For people easy to research you can be as sloppy as you want. Tom