At 11/7/2015 14:55, you wrote: >I am interested in the recommendations Terry and Lee have. I have a similar >situation but I have not merged the two projects yet. If you have two projects with data on the same persons (that is, persons that are essentially duplicates) and wish to combine them then it is a multi-step process. Hopefully, there will only be a few duplicate pairs. Otherwise, there is a lot of work ahead --especially after the first three steps which go quickly -- much of the later steps being tedium. <g> Still, once you do a few, it gets easier and goes a tiny bit faster. 1. Be sure to have a backup of both projects -- just in case! 2. Merge Project B into Project A. Assuming that there is one data set in each project then this makes Project A with two data sets (the original of Project A and the copy from Project B). Project B remains as it was. If Project A and/or B have multiple project then the merged Project A will have all data set that were in A originally and all data sets from Project B. 3. With both the data sets that contain the "duplicate" persons in the same Project (A), you now need to merge data set "2" (may be a different number, but the data set from Project B), into data set "1" (or the data set from Project A that has the "duplicates from that original Project). This data set "1" now has all "duplicates" in the one data set. If you wish (after checking that data set "1" is as you wish it), you can delete data set "2" (and any other data sets that you no longer need in project "A"). At this point, you need to merge each pair of duplicate persons. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to use the Check for Duplicate People (see the Tools menu). This will present you with a list of "candidate" duplicate pairs. You may then review each pair and either merge a pair or go on to the next pair. Personally, I prefer to do the merging by the second method but I often use this Check for Duplicate People function to get a list of candidates (you'll have to write them down) to review and merge later. The second method is to determine the candidate pairs and then using the Tools=>Merge Two People function, review and merge the pair. 4. The final step is Merge Two People. This merge process is the same whether merging in the Check for Duplicate People function or using the Merge Two People function. The Merge Two People window presents the Tags for each candidate person -- on the left and on the right. Note that the ID# for the left person will be the retained ID# and the ID# on the right will become unused after the merge -- so if you wish the ID# on the right to be retained than [Flip] the two persons. Now review each Tag on the left and its matching Tag on the right to see if the data is truly duplicated. If the data is completely duplicated then you can remove the X from one of the Tags (de-select it) and that Tag for that left/Right person) will be dropped in the merge but the selected (on with an X) will be retained.. Keep in mind that date/place and other data may be duplicated, but often Source Citations are not. So you may wish to retain both Tags for "manual" merging later (I'll discuss this below). After reviewing and selecting/de-selecting all Tag, click on the [Merge] button to do the final merge and delete the "duplicate" ID# (the one on the right). 5. This step may or may not be needed. After the duplicates are merged as desired, review each merged person to ensure that each is as you wish. You may have one or more merged person who still have two or more "duplicate" Tags. These may be the Tags having Source Citations that you did not want to lose. For each of these, you will need to manually add the citations from the one to the Tag you wish to keep. You can copy/paste some data. For Citation, open a citation on the one (throwaway) Tag, click [OK] to close it (and the Tag), go to the Tag to be retained open a new Citation window and hit [F3] to "copy" the citation into the window. This may seem like a lot of work and I guess it is. But the first steps go quickly and the later steps often go faster than you might suspect. If you are working for a list, it is easy to do a little at a time, take a break, and then do some more. My only caution is to have the backups at the beginning, and check each step as you go. Once persons or Tags are merges, you can't undo the merge except by starting over (you did do that backup for a reason <g>). Lee