Family Historian Tour

Merge/Compare

Figure 1 - the Merge/Compare Dialog

The middle pane of Figure 1 shows the current file. The right page shows the new file that is being compared with the current file. The left pane shows information about the comparison, and about what will happen if the files are merged now. For example, in Figure 1, Family Historian has matched the 2 records for Fiona Andrews in the 2 files. It has assigned a score of 100 to the match (see the left column). Any score over 0 indicates that Family Historian has found a match. The higher the score the more confident Family Historian is that the match is correct (100% certainty is of course never possible).

Where Family Historian matches a record or field, it puts them in the same row. So, for example there is a record for Stephen Wiley in the new file which has no match in the current file. And there are records for Michael Peabody, Thomas Andrews, and others, in the current file which have no match in the new one.

In Figure 1, the record for Fiona Andrews has been expanded, so we can see that the fields Name, Sex and Spouse family all match in both records, and will be merged (Family Historian calls this a 'Null Merge' because nothing actually changes as a result of such a 'merge'). However, birth and baptism details are only found in the new file, so these will be added. There are no details of Fiona Andrews parents in the new file, but there are in the current file, and these will be kept.

Any aspect of the merge can be overridden using the Match, Unmatch, Retain and Discard buttons, all of which can be used for fields and records alike. If, for example, you find a clash between event details in 2 matching records (birth, perhaps), you can keep the current data and discard the new data, keep the new data and discard the current data, or (the default) keep both.

You can sort on any column by clicking on it. So for example, to find all the record matches with a low score, simply click on the Score column in the left pane. You can select all low-scoring matches and unmatch all of them in one go if you wish.