Family Historian User Group

I just wondered what others are doing when it comes to family tree gecom files. Do you create a separate gedcom file for each family name? I'm wondering what people advise in terms of good practice and from experience please?


ID:2746

I'm sure it's been discussed before, but my recommendation is always everything in one place. You never know when you're going to find an unexpected link between branches, and you don't want to duplicate everything.

Yes quite a few times, one file for me, do have a file for 'random' people (eg extracted from GRO index, but not tied in yet), but other than that everyone in one file. I use named lists to keep my key people so I can quickly do a chart or report for them. One file makes it easy to see links and as Chris says avoids the horror of duplicated people. It's too easy to miss a cousin marriage of the tree is split in to parts.

Many thanks, as I'm getting to a point where the number of people is growing substantially. thank you for the advice.

I do know of people running files with 18,000 plus people.

Hi Mark,
Like the others i use 1 file for my main family tree with 6,000+ people with no trouble. What i do though is also maintain seperate files for my 'work in progress' investigations normally split by family name at the start of the line. When i am then happy i have the formatting, and sources all formatted as i like, and am happy that the links are proved i merge these files back into the main file.

Richard

18,000! wow!
Food for thought Richard thanks.

Just don't try over 400,000 individuals, 190,000 families, 54,000 places, 4400 sources and 1 note. FH does not like that many notes and crashes!

It's not my file, but one (of 130Mb) I received to just get about 15 individuals. Couldn't extract with FH, had to manually extract via a text editor.

I think the case for whether one should work in separate files depends on the individual research needs and should be decided on that basis.

In my case, I am studying family history as well as genealogy, so I am studying people associated with the family as well as blood relatives.

If you are doing a concentrated study of a single place, it can pay off to have files based on the place rather than the surnames. So I might have a main file with all the known relatives, but in my 'associates' file I can put in the business partners, witnesses to events, traveling companions in the passenger lists, and so on. If it turns out that one of these associated people is also a relative, their information can be copied over.

I also have files where I am attempting small one-name-studies of people with the same surname as people in my husband's line. I do not know yet if these people are cousins or siblings of my husband's g-grandmother, so while I am sorting them out, I keep them in a separate file.

For people who are new to Family Historian, I recommend using one of these secondary studies as a test dataset while you are learning the program. For instance, in the case of my husband's g-grandmother mentioned above, her mother re-married and the step-father's name is the one on her marriage announcement. I am looking for his children from his earlier marriage, but I am doing it in a separate file for now, because I want to make sure I have the right individual and not just someone with the same name.

In another case, I am trying to find my great-aunt in the census, and I have multiple candidates with the same name. One of these candidates is living with a family I do not know and her relation to the head-of-household is 'cousin'. I cannot find that family in other censuses, so I will be attempting to transcribe the entire street (it is three blocks long) and compare the census data to see if I can turn them up in the earlier and later censuses. There is no point in adding any of these families to my main file yet, because it may turn out that none of them are related, not even the person who has the same name as my great-aunt.

Let the data speak to you and do what makes the most sense to you.

Jan

Thanks Jan and all.
Very much a common sense thing and as You say, let the data speak to you.