What address book is the master?

I recently inherited my dad's old iPad and popped it into iTunes and set it all up which was no problem. However, his address book had over 3000 contacts, all of which have now synced to my MacBook, iPhone and my wife's iPhone. I want to go and cull all the contacts I don't want (about 2800) - and ensure I do this to a master address book so all devices have the right address book of around 200 contacts.

Any help is appreciated!

It won't matter where you do it, all of them should reflect the changes as you go. If one were to say there was a "master" it would either be the one on the Macbook or the one on iCloud but wjhatever device you make the changes at, all should reflect if they are all syncing from the same machine or from iCloud.

Many thanks - I'll give that a try.