Tom Wetmore wrote: > As Wes pointed out, there is nothing preventing a user of "ordinary" programs creating separate persons for each "evidence person" and then merging them into the final person later when they decide who is who. This is what I have to do with my program now. The problem with this approach is that once you merge you loose your research history. We need nondestructive merges, which I believe is best done by just building up trees of person records. 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. 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 ...). My genie program of choice has a free-form text section, into which I put my research notes (ie, birthyear extrap from census; month from census; day of month from tombstone; marriage name & date from copy of certificate; death from tombstone), and then when I merge two people, I also merge these notes, which creates a nice trail and enables me to see why I thought something (or didn't think so). Cheryl