File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 15 - Merge Files

Continuing this File Sharing and Brick Wall theme, Genea-Blogger Randy sent me an Email with a GEDCOM file attached, of the Ancestor's of William Knapp's wife, Sarah Cuter. I had spend the afternoon on a road trip to where William and Sarah where married, and many Cutter's are buried.

As is my practice, I do not JUST merge files. I take a little time to "get a handle" on the new file. I did the same "clean up" on this new file as I did with the first file, documented in this series.

The next thing, in preparation for Merging of these two files, is to do a File, Back Up on both files. From the Plan Workspace, I clicked on the More button to get the Statistics on both files.

This is new New file.

This is the file that I have been using for my research:

I kept this working file (GEDCOM for Blog) file open and clicked on File, Merge.

 The next screen is a suggestion to Back Up your file.

Since I had just backed up both files, I clicked on No. But I suggest that if you are merging files that you Back Up your file using the YES on this screen. Then you will see the files starting to be merged. They HAVE NOT been merged yet. You must select the file that you want merged into the currently open file. The File is selected.

The next screen is asking if you want to Merge the two files, OR Append this 2nd file to the currently open file. I chose to Merge the files.

The next screen is the MERGE WIZARD screen. What is important on this screen is to completely review each entry in the Right Hand Panel, for each Person in the Left Hand Panel.

In the RH Panel, you will have three choices, Select the Preferred Fact, you can Discard an item, or you can choose the item to be set at an Alt. Fact. You select the Preferred fact like the Birth Fact, below, where I selected the Birth Date and Place. That made the Birth Date become Discard but I changed that to Alt.

The LH Panel, has three sections: For Review, Merged, and New. Each person SHOULD be selected and the data reviewed BEFORE the Merge Button is selected. The Merge Button on this screen is to Merge everyone in the LH Panel. I do NOT recommend that you do you that until you have reviewed all of the data.


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Clicking on the Merge button will cause the two files to be merged.

The Plan Workspace, MORE button shows that some new people have been added, as expected.

A quick review of the file does not show too many issues, so I did a SyncNow to update the Ancestry Member Tree.

What was really nice is that ALL of the Tasks that I had entered into the new file came through into the Merged File.

Lesson Learned: Back Up your files before any Merge and check the results before moving one.

There will be a follow up post on one issue that w.s observed.


Copyright © 2011 by H R Worthington