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I posted about this in another thread:
After reading my Baird's, my understanding is that yes, the alumni of the group that is absorbed will have the chance to be initiated into the one that is doing the "take over". Now, there have been cases when say a organization has 20 chapters, but a few of them do not want to be absorbed. So they break away and stay the same, while all the other chapters get absorbed. Usually the groups that do not get absorbed will die out or eventually get absorbed by someone else. So basically people use the word absorbe and merger interchangably when discussing these things, but there is acutally a bit of a difference. Absorbing is when a big groups totally (or almost totally) takes over a little group. Sometimes, the groups will decide to retain some element of the second group so that their history is not totally forgotten-like singing a special song at convention time or keeping a senior ceremony, or something at founders day.
Now a true merger would be when two equally sized (or close to it) groups decide to actually merge in order to become more stable/ bigger. For instance ABC has 20 chapters and XY has 20, if they merge, they now have 40. Normally what happens in that situaion is that they will retain the letters, etc. of one, but incorporate elements of the other. For instance, keep the letters, colors and ritual of one, but adopt the flower, and pledge cermeony of the other. This is actually a pretty good deal for groups if they are willing to do a bit of compromising. I often wonder if locals or regionals from all over the country did this, they'd have a huge organization!
Beta Sigma Omicron had 61 chapters and 15,000 initiates before it was merged with ZTA, 15 of which were active at the time of the "merger". So I would consider that more of a merger than an absorbing I guess. I dunno. However, the chapter at Fenn elected to go local instead, and the chapter at Queens decided to go local under the name Beta Sigma Delta, and at Hunter-they chose to stay Beta Sigma Omicron and function under that name but as a local sorority. So, only 12 joined ZTA.
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