Merging people

Description of the process Gramps uses to merge two people.

Contents

Definition

Gramps provides a combination of automated and manual selections when merging people. Once two people have been merged, the combined person replaces all instances of the previous two people in the database.

Merge process

Fig. .1 Merge People - "Detailed Selection" & "Context Information" sections expanded - dialog - example

During the merge process, two people are combined into a single person. It is necessary to select the "resultant person", or the person that remains after the merge is complete. This "resultant person" keeps its primary data (such as name and Gramps ID).

Primary Name

The "resultant person" keeps its primary name. The name of the other person is added as an alternate name.

Birth Event

The "resultant person" keeps its primary birth event, unless the birth event does not exist. The other person's birth event is added as the "Alternate Birth" event if the "resultant person" has a birth event. otherwise, it is used as the primary birth event.

Death Event

The "resultant person" keeps its primary death event, unless the death event does not exist. The other person's death event is added as the "Alternate Death" event if the "resultant person" has a death event. Otherwise, it is used as the primary death event.

Parents

The user must select the preferred parents. The user may decide if the merged person is to remain as a child in the other set of preferred parents, or in any other set of parents.

Spouses/Children

The user will be able to select the families in which the person should remain a parent. If the user chooses not to include the merged person in a family, the person will be removed from the family.

Gramps ID

One and only one Gramps ID can be selected. The user will be given the option to store the unselected Gramps ID as a personal attribute ("Previous Gramps ID")

Automatic merges

Fig. Merge Families - "Detailed Selection" & "Context Information" sections expanded - dialog - example

Many items will be combined from the original two people into the merged person. The user will be able to alter the information later by editing the person. This information includes:

• Addresses
• Source References
• URLs
• Events
• Attributes
• Media Objects
• Notes are to be combined into a single note, with the text separated by a blank line.

See also

• User manual... detailed Entering and editing data, part 3 : Merging records
  • Persons, Families, Events, Places, Sources, Citations, Repositories, Media objects, Notes
• Find Possible Duplicate People Family Tree Processing tool. Searches the current Tree database, looking for the entries that may represent the same person with a selectable threshold.
• Import and Merge addon Family Tree Processing tool. Compares a Gramps XML database with the current one, and allows merging of the differences.
• Merge Media addon Family Tree Processing tool. Searches for Media entries that point to the same media file and merges them together. Automerge option for Places, Sources and Repositories.
• MultiMerge addon gramplet (Isotammi addons). Allows the merging of multiple objects in a single step
• Place Cleanup gramplet. Place Cleanup Gramplet assists in merging places, as well as completing places from the GeoNames web database.
• CLI Merge addon utility tool. Merge primary objects via the Command Line Interface
• Handle.bash external utility. A bash script working with multiple databases merging to select branches at will without collisions.
• The primary/preferred record is indicated by where that record fall in the order or records in the list. Higher (or leftmost) has higher priority. List of Re-ordering features in Gramps