Single Contacts>>Households

[Freya von Moltke-Foundation]

Another quick question here about merging contact possibilities:

If you have a single contact in CiviCRM and later the single contact becomes a household, it is not possible to simply convert the contact into a household.  It is possible to create a relationship between the single contact and the household, but information like activities and donations cannot automatically be transferred over.

It would be a nice feature to convert or merge a contact with a household, and have their activity, etc. merged as well. Should be like the tool “merge contacts” which are double in the database.

[FrTommy]

You're thinking about it wrong.

Households contain contacts. Households are not a person by themselves but represent a specific address/location where multiple people (or a single person) might reside.

So for example there might be the following:

Smith Household
123 Any Street
--John Smith - Head of household, -Spouse of Jane Smith
--Jane Smith - head of Household, -Spouse of John Smith
--sally smith - Member of household, -Daughter of John Smith, -Daughter of Jane Smith


Doe Household
456 Any Street
--Jon Doe - Head of Household


So John, Jane, Sally, and Jon are all individuals. They are members of a Household which is a specific address/location. They each have a relationship to that household and potentially each other.  If John and Jane get a divorce and John moves out then you end the Household relationship for him and create a new household with a new relationship for him to the new household. You would also end the spouse relationship with john and jane.

Does that help?