Thank you Charles...
combining the documents was quite easy, BUT... NO solution at all for the page numbering !
I am working with Word 2019 and none of your refered articles gave me the solution; As it was impossible to remove the 'page numbering' nor the 'page footers' prior to combining I now have plenty of pages with identical numbers and, once again... no way (that I know) to remove/to arrange numbering.... ????
any suggestion, please ?