In a message dated Tue, 12 Jun 2001 7:48:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, "MScheffler" <figaro@dreamscape.com> writes: << In making a gedcom from the laptop with the new information, and importing it back into her main database, she had created duplicates of almost everything except the new information. >> What confuses me about this..is that my assumption has always been that exporting a gedcom *from* FO and importing it back *to* another copy of FO would leave all original people's records un-changed and thusly Smart Merge would have no problems merging all *but* the new additions. Perhaps the import into an older version of FO strips some info from the original records? Or the export back out of the older version?? -=Kevin=-

> my assumption has always been that exporting a gedcom *from* FO and > importing it back *to* another copy of FO would leave all original people's records un-changed and thusly Smart > Merge would have no problems merging all *but* the new additions.... Perhaps the import into an older version of FO strips some info from the original records? Or the export back out of the older version?? You all keep saying that I have different versions. I don't. They are both the same :) I would have expected the imported GEDCOM to have done what you said, but it didn't. No one was more surprised than I was when I discovered that my spouses and children had doubled! I have transferred like this many times and this is the first time this has happened. Clare

Wouldn't it be nice if genealogy programs did that? But none of them do. They will not automatically merge two people unless those two people have a minimum of data like parents, children, dates and places, etc. Each program has a different set of things that it looks for before it will merge two people. In other words, just because two people are identical, doesn't mean they will merge. They must also have a minimum amount of data entered. Norma

Kbens0n@aol.com wrote: > What confuses me about this..is that my assumption has always been >that exporting a gedcom *from* FO and importing it back *to* another >copy of FO would leave all original people's records un-changed and >thusly Smart Merge would have no problems merging all *but* the new >additions. Smart Merge will not merge any duplicate pairs where there is any remote possibility at all that these two may not actually be the same person. If they have no birth date entered, for example, it will not merge them because it doesn't know for sure that they both have the same birth date. If any ambiguity exists, smart merge will not merge them. So, if you copy your database on top of itself (with a gedcom file import or with drag & drop), everyone in the database will be duplicated and lots of them will not be merged by smart merge. In short, you will have a mess. For this reason, smart merge has only limited usefulness. The proper way to work your database between two computers using gedcom files is to make a gedcom file from the last used, up-to-date computer and then import that to a brand new database on the out-of-date computer. That new database then will be your new master database. Then you can relegate the old database to a backup (in case you need to go back to it later) and delete it from your active database folder. Using FO backups is better for doing this because the "book phrasing" of your user defined events will be retained in a backup where they will not survive through a gedcom transfer. It is also faster because you can restore right on top of the old database (after backing it up, of course), without the need to make new databases or to carry around the large gedcom files. (FO backups are compressed and are much smaller than gedcom files of the same database). Wayne League