Sandy Rozhon wrote: >Just prior to running the match/merge tool in PAF, a little window >comes up telling you to backup your file because you may lose some >people. Can someone tell me under what circumstances this loss will >occur? I've been matching and merging like crazy and really haven't >seen anything get lost, so I'm wondering what would make that happen? > >Sandy > > >==== PAF-5-USERS Mailing List ==== >PAF-5-USERS Mailing List Archives >http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/index/PAF-5-USERS/ > > > > Exact wording from warning box: "Using merge may delete some records from your file and may change others. Do you want to make a backup before continuing?" When you merge two records the one that shows on the right half of the screen ends up getting deleted. By default the information in the record on the left gets kept. The checkboxes beside each field on the right give you a chance to over-ride the information on the left on a field by field basis. Say for example the record on the left has good and completed data except for the burial info. While the record on the right has complete burial info. You could check the box next to burial info on the right before doing the merge. Then you would get burial info from one record and all other info from the other. If the record that happens to show up on the left has poor info in general and you would prefer to keep the info on from the record on the right there is a button to switch to two. But generally speaking if you don't do anything to override it the record that shows on the left will be the one that is kept and all the relationships linked to the record on the right will be adjusted to point to the record on the left.