At 7/24/2015 18:17, you wrote: > However, I'm up in the air about what to do about entering this >information into TMG: keep each family separate or just have one >gigantic database. I started TMG with about 9600 persons in a single data set (at a time when you could only work one data set at a time). That grew over a period of year to tens of thousands in that one data set. With the advent of TMG v5 (and later) and its Project concept, I now have over 56,000 people in a single project and all still in one data set. Depending on my needs (usually for a specific report or for exchange with other researchers), I will create a second (or more) data set in that project. Usually these "sub-" data sets are temporary and only last a few days although a few may last longer. In a few cases, I will make one of those "sub-" data sets into their own project -- often because it will be used for the basis of a client's project. Like you, I have a large number of people from a single area and there are many inter-relationships among the various lines. Because of this, I will often research a line a bit more as those lines often tie back in to other lines -- more or less in a back door to "brick wall" lines. So I have something like two dozen projects. Most of these are relatively small and over half are client projects and half of those unconnected (at least so far) to my main project. One reason that I keep my 56 thousand persons in a single data set rather than have multiple projects (or multiple "permanent" data sets in a project) is that it reduces the amount of redundancy. If I had a data set for my lines and one for my wife's lines, each would include us, our parents, siblings, and descendants and spouses. But, also I might miss that my and my wife's two-great grandmothers have the same name - although they are only related by marriage. Further, I would need to have duplicate Sources and Repositories (although there would be many other unique Sources & Repositories. Similarly, when I go on a research trip, I would have to print out multiple reports listing Research Tasks (of course, I could generate the reports and combine them in my word processor or spreadsheet. But that is extra work). Having everything together in one data set just makes things a lot easier. Having said that, there are some minor down sides to a single data set. The main one being that you often wind up with many people having the same name (or very close to the same). This may result in confusion as to which family the persons belongs to. I do not find this to be a great problem although if can be a bit frustrating to have to look at each to decide which if wanted. There are various ways to get around this problem. I tend to go with entering a Reference field code indicating a family or some other "pointer". Some users will add something in one of the Name fields that point to the correct family. A second possibility is implied above in that you can have multiple data sets in a single project. The advantage of this is that you can see all persons in the project regardless of which data set a person resides. Or, you can select to look at only one data set at a time (hiding the rest). The down side (advantage) of the multiple data set project is that each data set's Persons, Sources, Repositories, Tasks, etc. are unique to their own data set. That is, you may be ready to enter John Smith in data set A and know that he happens to already be in data set B. You cannot the data set B John Smith to data set A in any way because data sets are completely independent of each other (only the picklists and the like show information from multiple data sets). Lee