Sherry, I had mine that way too, Until it began throwing away whole family lines at a time. I updated my program and readded the thrown out data, thank goodness it was in a book form as well. It did it again.......................................... I contacted FTM back when it was Broderbund and not Ancestry! I was told that it would do that, that I had to divide them back out into seperate family files. I was told to back it up first. This was back before CD-ROM came to be! So I had to back my tree up onto 5.5 floppy's It took 120 of them to back up my tree! But I did it and I still have them. I then divided my tree down into the seperate family names. I figure if the company tells me to do this, then that is what I need to do.................................I have never again had that problem! FTM has never sence thrown out any of my data! And I have collected a whole lot more between then and now. What I do is this.................................................... I have each of all of my family names in seperate tree's. Then I have Gail's Tree In Gails' Tree it shows how all the others come into play! I can then print out my Tree plus any others that I need to combine or list to share with others. Most of the time I only have to print out what the person really wants in the first place, the family line from the surname in question! I even run trees in my system for others that I am helping from time to time, it helps make it easier at times to help that person. Plus then you can print out a report for them and e-mail it to them as you said. When done you can delete the files that you don't need yourself and go on and not worry about messing up your own research. When I did my last upgrade to 2006 VER. I again asked if I needed to keep them this way and the lady said yes! That it is the most recommended way to be safe. I guess it has to be up to each of us to decide really. I suppose it would also depend on how much data you have collected. I also printed mine out before I divided it up. It printed out to 900 or so pages plus the index and that was without the entire Green line....................................................... That Green line goes back to Elijiah GREEN seen in POWG. Hope this is useful to some of you. Gail ----- Original Message ----- From: <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, November 04, 2005 7:40 AM Subject: [GAWARE] Re: GAWARE-D Digest V05 #189 > Question: I wonder how ya'll keep your files. Do you have each family > in a separate file, or do you have just one big file? The reason I've > never merged them together is because if I share a GED Com file, it > would include too many other families of no interest and probably be too > large to email. > > ~~~~~~~~~~ > Teresa > I use FTM 11.0, and I keep all my info in one large file. I started out > with > seperate files, but soon found a lot of the same people in several files, > so, > decided to merge them into one. It is great fun seeing how closely knit > the > families of SE Georgia are. (I share many common ancestors with my > husband.) > You can easily e-mail genealogy reports of as many generations as you > want. > BUT, I highly recommend you make a back-up copy of each file BEFORE you > merge > anything. You may end up with several 'duplicate individuals' but that > can > easily be fixed too. > I am a member of the rootsweb FTM list and you may want to subscribe to it > and post your question about merging files there for advice. > [email protected] > > Sherry > > > ==== GAWARE Mailing List ==== > GAWARE Archives: http://lists.rootsweb.com/index/usa/GA/ware.html > GAWARE GenWeb: http://www.rootsweb.com/~gaware/ > > ============================== > Search the US Census Collection. Over 140 million records added in the > last 12 months. Largest online collection in the world. Learn more: > http://www.ancestry.com/s13965/rd.ashx > >