Family Historian User Group

Hi,

I am conducting a one-name study and have had a gedcom sent to me by another researcher containing their genealogy. Within the gedcom, there is their direct line as well as some small trees of with people who share the surname.

I am looking to split the gedcom via split tree helper to only include the surname branches for merging into my one-name study.

I am not looking to include their entire extended family history into the one-name study, simply the families of the surname holder.

Is it possible to split a tree only on surname, retaining the family structure? If so, could you please advise how? Thanks

It should be possible to construct a Query to achieve what you want and use that in the Split Tree Helper.

The FHUG KB has some candidate Queries such as Surname Summary.

However, a key criterion is "families of the surname holder". What exactly do you mean?
Who do you consider as members of those families? Parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, children, grandchildren...

A variant of that approach is to build a Named List of who you want to keep.
That can be done by adding Query results to the Named List or by selecting people from Diagrams.
Then you can use the Named List Members query in the Split Tree Helper.

Thanks Mike for the pointer to the Surname Summary query and utilising Named Lists.

I was thinking of walking the tree and disconnecting branches (spouse parents etc) that I did not need for the surname tree. However this will not work in the cases of small branches/trees that are disconnected from the main contributors tree.

By "families of the surname holder" I simply mean bearers of the surname - children, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles etc that share the surname. I am not interested in the daughter lines, the descendants of a daughter with the surname, nor with the parents/ancestors of the spouses who do not share the surname.

HTH

For one name studies, I believe most people hold on to the spouses of persons with the same surname.

So a query which selects everyone matching the surname(s) you are interested in and then adds just their spouses should work for your purposes. You can then export everyone in the query result. I would recommend using the export rather than split tree as a first pass as it will sort out the sources and place records you need any when you create a project from it will copy over the relevant media.

Thanks Jane, I will give that a go.