Thanks MikaelH and Aristos for your answers,
I was rather hoping there would be an easier way around this hence my rather open question, but I can see there are too many caveats for it to be a simple answer. My specific problem involved objects containing other objects as Aristos mentioned (I have a composition). However for this specific case I always want to clone the references. The composition is also built exclusively of items with a shared ancestor. So to do it I have taken the method that MikaelH mentioned, included "call parent method", and replaced the "child" references (i.e. th