Distinguishing Repeated Handovers from Duplicate Records in Community Equipment-Loan Histories

Community equipment-loan histories may contain several reports of one handover and repeated handovers described by identical records. This paper develops a conditional method for retaining uncertainty about those alternatives. It distinguishes record identity, occurrence identity, event type and process membership, and defines a custody-transfer boundary for a fictional lending service. Admissible partitions combine positive and negative co-reference evidence with explicit temporal assumptions. Under pairwise constraints, an elementary graph construction bounds represented occurrences. Under interval constraints alone, a self-contained minimum-stabbing argument identifies the fewest instantaneous occurrences consistent with the records. Necessary and possible co-reference have different logical properties; possible co-reference can fail transitivity. A sustained dossier examines delayed acknowledgments, repeated transfers, renewals and clock uncertainty. Verified event-log specifications and uncertain-event research provide antecedents, while the philosophical discussion examines historical warrant, administrative convenience and plural event boundaries. The resulting bounds concern represented occurrences under stated evidence assumptions. Undocumented events, disputed boundaries and empirical performance remain separate research obligations.