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Archiver > TMG > 2002-01 > 1009919399


From: "Caroline Gurney" <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] Merging and splitting.
Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2002 21:09:59 -0000
References: <14d.69318f7.29632763@aol.com> <3C31FAB8.DD8FD913@infoave.net>


I'd like to give my vote to Richard Brogger in the merging/splitting debate.
I find merging MUCH easier.

For about a year, I erroneously researched a line which turned out in the
end not to be mine. Because it was well documented (including published
books), during that year I entered a huge amount of information about this
line into my main dataset. This included much information on siblings,
marriage partners etc, in all over 500 directly related people. Because I
love TMG's witness & role features, I also added non-related witnesses to
deeds & wills etc.

Since discovering that this line is not "mine", I want to split it off into
its own dataset & keep it as a present for some lucky future researcher who
IS related to these people <g>.

To split off the 500 odd related people is not too bad, as the focal point
of the erroneous line is just one marriage. By running LOP reports to set a
SPLIT flag, then adding spouses, ancestors, descendants & running the
reports until no-one else is added, I can identify the main group to be
split. However, I can find no easy way to identify all the people linked to
these 500 not by relationship but by being a principal or witness on a
common tag. I have had to work through all 500 plus checking all their tags
:-(

I was doing this the other night when TMG had enough of running reports &
setting flags & crashed on me. I was unable to repair the dataset & had to
resort to a backup. So now I must begin the process all over again :-(

By contrast, merging datasets is a piece of cake, provided you don't
duplicate people in more than one dataset. I keep my own family in one, main
set, my husband's in another & my first husband's (father of my children) in
a third. If I want to print a tree for my children it is simple to merge my
dataset & their father's. Only 4 people are duplicated - myself, my first
husband & the 2 children. It is a matter of a few minutes to merge these 4.

The biggest downside of separate datasets is synchronising tags, flags,
accent colours, sources etc. Good ideas implemented in one dataset aren't
automatically carried over to another. However, it is easy to synchronise
dataset B with dataset A by going into dataset A & creating a new dataset,
C, checking all the boxes so that TMG reproduces the tags, flags etc from
dataset A. The merge B into C.

Caroline Gurney
Portsmouth, UK


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