In today's product when two individual records are merged ALL relationships are moved from the non-surviving (merge from) record to the surviving (merge to) record EXCEPT spouse relationships when the surviving record already has a spouse linked. If the non-surviving record has a constituent spouse this spouse record becomes unlinked and now represents a single individual to be solicited, potentially along with the surviving record until it is also identified as a duplicate and merged. If the non-surviving record has a non-constituent spouse this non-constituent spouse record (when ‘Delete Source Constituent’ is checked) will be deleted along with the non-surviving constituent record. Both of these scenarios have huge implications for data integrity and data preservation especially considering BB's roll out of a mass merge utility.

RE support have confirmed that this is how RE spouse functionality has been designed and there is currently no plan to change this functionality. Their best practice and work around is to go record by record pre-merge to ensure that only one of the two records has a spouse linked. This has been our best practice when merging manually however when considering the use of a mass merge utility this has become a huge barrier to implementation. There is no point using a mass merge utility if I have to manually touch the records pre and post merge for cleanup.

I would love to see spouse relationships treated in the same way all other relationships are and unconditionally merged to the surviving record. If, when merging (manually or via a merge utility) there is a spouse already linked on the surviving record (constituent record or non-constituent record) I would like to see the spouse from the non-surviving record merged over to the relationships tab. Because each record can only have one spouse linked the spouse being merged from the non-surviving record would need to be unchecked as spouse however it would be easy to build a cleanup query that looks for relationships that are not linked as spouse but have a relationship/reciprocal that represents a spouse relationship, This would allow users to efficiently and consciously make a decision about how to handle this data rather than the records being un-linked with no way to tie them back together or worse deleted with no way of ensuring all data has been accounted for on other records.