Dear All I think I have selected the wrong route - can anyone please advise me. I have one file F1 and have just received a new gedcom F2. (Each has some 5000 entries.) I know that 4-5 individuals are on both F1 and F2. I want to merge F1 and F2, avoiding duplicates. I decided to use the "Compare two databases (C2D)" utility. (Was this my MISTAKE NUMBER ONE???) I easily compared and dealt with the 4-5 individuals I knew were on both F1 and F2. But I also want to have all the other individuals on F2 copied onto F1. Doing this using the C2D facility is extremely long-winded. It seems to work generation by generation. I have found myself repeatedly having to press 4 buttons: "Copy Spouse", "Copy Event" (Marriage), Select "Children", "Copy all Children". (Is this my MISTAKE NUMBER TWO?) I have spent about 5 hours repeatedly pressing these 4 buttons. Surely there is a quicker way of doing this. And how do I know when I have copied all of F2 onto F1? Now just to make my day, the computer has crashed. Does this mean I have lost all the work I have done? Thanks for any advice you can give. Disconsolately yours (it's raining here in York!) JOHN BIBBY

John Concerning the PC crash it depends what type of crash (software or Hardware) as to whether you loss any data. Concerning the two files I would have import both into a test data base and then did a compare against my original looking for the duplicates. Another way would have been to run a alphabetic report on the test data base and resolve the dups there which is probably a lot faster than comparing data bases. After all way resolve it would become my new data base. I have three gedcoms I would like to compare against, one has 105,000 person in it, another has 150,000 people in it and the 3rd 500,000+ and my file only has 46,000, the problem with the compare it sequentially goes thorough the database on the right (the read only one) making for about 450,000 more compares than necessary. Jim -----Original Message----- From: bk-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:bk-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of John Bibby Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2012 7:08 AM To: bk@rootsweb.com Subject: [BK] Merging two files - using 'Compare' Dear All I think I have selected the wrong route - can anyone please advise me. I have one file F1 and have just received a new gedcom F2. (Each has some 5000 entries.) I know that 4-5 individuals are on both F1 and F2. I want to merge F1 and F2, avoiding duplicates. I decided to use the "Compare two databases (C2D)" utility. (Was this my MISTAKE NUMBER ONE???) I easily compared and dealt with the 4-5 individuals I knew were on both F1 and F2. But I also want to have all the other individuals on F2 copied onto F1. Doing this using the C2D facility is extremely long-winded. It seems to work generation by generation. I have found myself repeatedly having to press 4 buttons: "Copy Spouse", "Copy Event" (Marriage), Select "Children", "Copy all Children". (Is this my MISTAKE NUMBER TWO?) I have spent about 5 hours repeatedly pressing these 4 buttons. Surely there is a quicker way of doing this. And how do I know when I have copied all of F2 onto F1? Now just to make my day, the computer has crashed. Does this mean I have lost all the work I have done? Thanks for any advice you can give. Disconsolately yours (it's raining here in York!) JOHN BIBBY Remember - Use the Archives at http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/search ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to BK-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message