Thanks for your response, Keith. I know that duplicates are not allowed in the final form: I did not want to make a duplicate, I wanted to keep it to hold the parts together until I could manually merge the duplicates. For a typist, manual entry may be as quick, but for those of us who did not learn typing (or keyboarding) it is MUCH slower particularly if ones fingers won't hit the right key ;-) Every time I come to that stage of adding a GEDCOM, I am confused by the instructions.