Merging People
There are times when a person is in the system multiple times. If this happens you will need to merge them into one person.
Do a name search on your person. As you can see there are two Laura Ingalls in the system. One has identifying information and one doesn’t. BEFORE YOU MERGE THEM DO SOME INVESTIGATION!! Merging can not be reversed so verify, are the addresses the same, are the relatives the same, why do you think these are the same person? I once accidentally merged twins, they had the same address, dob, relatives, but they were not the same person.
Once you have decided these are the same person, select the name you are going to keep. Normally you will keep the oldest name if there is history in that name.
Our Laura with a file # 1 has 6 cases, our Laura with file number 22 only has 1 case and it was just added. I’m going to keep file #1.
Click on Laura #1 to get into her Person Detail screen. Click on the Merge button at the bottom of that screen.
This will take you to the Merge Identities screen. Click the Get person name button which will take you to the Name Search screen.
Since you recently searched for Laura her names should appear at the bottom under the Most recent names used, but if not, simply search for her again. Click on the Laura #22 to merge her into Laura #1.
When you merge two names, the name you merged into another name becomes an alias name. This is helpful if the names are different, such as a woman who gets married and has been entered into the system with both her maiden name and her married name. If there are documents in the system with that maiden name, you should keep it as an alias. However, if the names are the same and were simply a duplicate, you should delete that alias, otherwise you still have two duplicate names in the system.