John, I just wrote a short LifeLines program that prunes the contents of a database made up of GEDCOM records and creates a GEDCOM file that holds only the person and family records for an initial person, all that persons ancestors, all spouses of all ancestors, and all children of all ancestors. You would have to install LifeLines (on many Linux distributions), load it with your master GEDCOM file, and then run this program. proc main () { indiset(persons) getindi(person, "Enter person to base a GEDCOM file around.") addtoset(persons, person, 0) set(persons, union(persons, ancestorset(persons))) set(persons, union(persons, spouseset(persons))) set(persons, union(persons, childset(persons))) "0 HEAD\n" gengedcomstrong(persons) "0 TRLR\n" }