Reviewing imports and merging duplicates

Real parish data has duplicates and near-matches. Vianney surfaces them for review and merges only when you say so — keeping the richer record and losing nothing.

Reviewing matches

• For sacraments with no ID to match on, Vianney sorts results into confident, ambiguous, and unmatched.
• Confident matches can attach automatically; ambiguous and unmatched ones wait for you to pick the person or create a new one. Nothing is dropped silently.

Merging duplicates

• 1. Vianney finds likely duplicates — the same person entered twice, or a maiden-name/married-name pair.
• 2. You review each and confirm the merge.
• 3. On merge, every reference — sacraments, family links, notes, photo, ministries — moves to the surviving record, and a former surname is kept as a maiden name.

Tips

• Merging is always explicit and logged; a later re-import updates the survivor rather than re-creating the duplicate.
• Work through ambiguous matches a few at a time — your decisions teach the data to line up.