Thanks all!
Dreamboat, your solution is a good one. However, "Groups" is an Outlook term, actually. If you open Outlook, and click on the address book button or press Crtl Shift B, you see the Address book, and if you click the "New" button to create a new contact, it gives you a choice of creating a new contact or a new group. Once created, a group shows up in the "To" menu when a mail message (e-mail)is addressed. Using groups allows you to send an e-mail to all addresses in the group without manually selecting them, and I'll bet there are ways to make other uses of groups.
I've experimented with some of the ideas you all have suggested, and it is true there are many ways to skin a cat (with apologies to the feline lovers in the forum). I settled on creating a subfolder under contacts, and copying my contacts for the group into the new folder. This keeps the contact data intact in its original form, but allows the data to be manipulated diffently in each folder - for instance, you can use multiple parties names if there are several people at one address, by putting "Jane Roe and John" in the First Name field and "Roe" in the last name field, or moving a middle name into the first name field with the first name, since the Mail Merge in Word disregards the middle name, and Outlook only contemplates one person per contact. The downside of all this, of course, is that as soon as you create multiple folders containing different files for variations on the same data, you increase the future data input chore when addresses or other data changes-Bummer. This would be avoided by using groups, I think, if there were a way to to a mail merge from a group, and is probably also avoided by the use of categories, as suggested by Holdew - which may be my approach next time I have to do this, or the first time there is a data update necessary, but for the immediate task the problem is solved. Neither use of groups or categories will, however, allow use of one form of name or address for one purpose, and another form for another (for example formal names for business correspondence and husband and wife names, or "The Roe Family" for social correspondence such as holiday greeting cards. Anybody have any ideas for achieving that without creating duplication of future data input effort if contact info changes?
Anne Troy