Thursday, September 24, 2015

Pondering Merging Two Trees in RootsMagic

We attended a surprise wedding in the Bay Area last weekend - it was supposed to be my brother-in-law Paul's 70th birthday party, but he and his longtime partner Deb decided to get married after 23 years of living and loving together.  It was a fun and beautiful event, complete with renewing contact with several cousins.  Now I have another sister-in-law!

I have done a fair amount of research on Deb's ancestry, as I have on Paul's ancestry (because it is my wife's ancestry and the ancestry of my children and grandchildren), and now I have the challenge of "should I merge Deb's tree with Randy's and Paul's tree?"

I think the answer is YES!  But Deb's tree is in Family Tree Maker 2014 synced with an Ancestry Member Tree, while my tree is in RootsMagic 7.

I made a GEDCOM of Deb's tree (548 persons), and imported it into a separate RootsMagic 7 file.  Then I used the "Search and Replace" function in RootsMagic to change all of the place names with "USA" to "United States" so that it's compatible with my RootsMagic tree file.

Next, I need to standardize all of the place names - many of the entries were obtained from using Ancestry Hints and the place names that were attached are not standardize - some have the word "County" in them, and many place names did not have a state or country.  I'm in the middle of doing this.  When I'm done, I will go through the place list to find the ones I missed.

Finally, there are the sources.  They are mostly from Ancestry.com, and therefore are not Evidence Explained quality, or even close to it.  I will have to work with those trying to get them into the appropriate source citation formats as time goes by.

I think I'll delay the actual merge process in RootsMagic 7 until I get the place names done, and then work on the sources using the citations I already have for many of the records.  I need to mull and ponder this task some more.

I wonder what I've missed?  I haven't done this for awhile!

This is fun!  But it's going to be some work too.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/09/pondering-merging-two-trees-in.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

2 comments:

Laura said...

Using RootsMagic 7, consider using File, Import list yo import the place list, sources, repositories and other lists you may need from your other database.
You may be able to just merge many of the places from Ancestry to your imported standardized places. And, you would have your sources in the new database to use when making source corrections.

mbm1311 said...

You know you're a crazy genealogist when you show up at your brother's surprise wedding and come home with your new sister-in-law's gedcom!