Merge Newer Record into Older Record

Tiffany Farnsworth Nash

Please consider making the older record the default (Surviving Person) for merges to retain info from the "Latest Changes" log.

I would also recommend that a statement be posted at the top of the merge recommending that the Newer Record be merged into Older Record.

Mary Anna Ebert

@Tiffany Farnsworth Nash Thanks for the feedback!

This is more complicated than it sounds. We currently determine who is the survivor by default using a number of factors. It looks at things like: the number of sources, the number of relationships, the number of changes on a person, and a few other criteria. You always have the option to switch the positions of people in the merge.

If you have examples of where this may be broken, we'd be happy to take a look.

Thanks!

Tiffany Farnsworth Nash

1. I found a Georgia Barbara Barker that had a Merge Hint and I printed out the Change Log for each person.

Georgia Barbara Barker (G7FW-92T) (created 2020)

Georgia Barbara Barker (GTM6-C51) (created 2024)

2. I merged them with the Older Profile into the Newer Profile, so (GTM6-C51) is now the current profile.

3. I printed out the Change Log that remains after the merge.

Results: The older Change Log information no longer exists.

Suggestion: Always merge from Newer Profiles into Older Profiles to retain all Change Log info. This should a

lso make this process less complicated for programming.

Thank you for investigating this issue.

Gordon Collett

The older change log does exist and you can always find it. Just go to the current change log, find the merge, click on the name on the delete profile to go to that profile, then check out that profile's change log.

There can certainly be situations where a lot of good work has been done on a profile so that it has a long change log then an older duplicate that has hardly been touched and so has just a couple of lines in the change log is finally found. You would want to merge the old one into the newer one.

There have been a couple of times when I have spent days repairing profiles that are a confusing mess of multiple bad merges. The change log contains so much wrong information and so many merges and unmerges that after restoring all the lost profiles and distributing the proper information to the correctly restored profiles and after finally determining who the original profile was supposed to be, that I have created a new profile for that one and purposefully merged the older one into the new one to hide away the change log in hopes that no one will go looking for it and get overwhelmed by the sight of dozens of merges, dozens of restores, sources coming and going, multiple versions of vital information, and relationship getting shifted all over the place.

Being able to choose which profile and which change log to keep can in certain situations be an important feature they need to keep.

Tiffany Farnsworth Nash

Thank you Gordon! I was unaware that the older log was always available. As long as it is available then I guess we can close this request. Thank you all.