I have a project with large number of commits (more than 1000) merged from different branches.
I need to change author's name of the first commit.

Tried to do it with

```
git rebase -i --root

```

Set "edit" near this commit.
Then used

```
git commit --amend --author="Author Name <email@address.com>
git rebase --continue

```

**And I get an unimaginable amount of merge conflicts... Too much to resolve them manually.**

The first error is (if resolve it I get similar errors after):

```
CONFLICT (add/add): Merge conflict in README.md
Could not apply a03a0ce1... master # Merge branch 'master' into 'dev'

```

Tried to use --rebase-merges flag but got the same result.

Does anybody know why it happens? Any other ways to solve?
Thanks!