> Oddly enough, and despite what I've heard said, when I > imported the PAF file into a LEGACY file (direct import, not > GED), the UIDs changed. Seems to me that's a bit awkward > for someone trying to use those UIDs for anything. Cheryl, In GEDCOM the UID's (not actually called that by GEDCOM) "belong" to GEDCOM. That is, a GEDCOM import process is free to change the id values to anything it likes. You can see why this is needed because of clashes between the ids on incoming records and the ids already in the database. Most programs start assigning ids as I1, I2, I3 for person ids, so if you import two files that were both exported by the same program, even though the data is completely different, there will be id clashes to resolve. Many people feel they should "own" their ids, and they learn to navigate through their databases by memorizing a few key ids. GEDCOM has a solution or this in the REFN tag. The value of the REFN tag is a user-assigned id value. If your program is GEDCOM compatible it should allow you to search by REFN values as well as id values. Of course, if you try to import a GEDCOM file that has a REFN id that conflicts with one already in your database, the import process will have to resolve that somehow. Tom