At 9/23/2015 17:59, Linda M. Towne wrote: >I'm looking at my TMG database and the number of people in it. I have a >rabbit hole approach to research which means I end up on tangents and >researching 3rd cousins 8 times removed and in-laws to out-laws and >other distant kin rather than my direct line exclusively. > >It's easy to output such a database with Second Site (thank you John >Cardinal). But less so to paper - which the gist of this (and previous) >discussions has shown is probably the best way to have the data outlive me. > >Obviously I need to break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks >of family and also accept that not everyone will make it to paper. I >just get overwhelmed at where to start. > >God willing - at 45, I have many years left to me but as we all know, >there are no guarantees. And the lack of a successor to TMG thus far >makes the need to have my data in another format more necessary since as >a user of witnesses and roles and sentences - it's unlikely to GEDCOM >out easily. The way I would do it is to basically export (via GEDCOM or in reports) a family at a time. Or you could create a Focus Group of the "end-of-line" (EOL) persons (ones having no father of mother) for a number of families and use that to control the export. For a relatively small project, that would be fairly simple. For a larger project, this may need to be broken up into smaller Focus Groups. For the past couple of years, I have been cleaning up my main project. In doing this, I identifying all my EOL persons and set a Flag identifying them. Then, for all EOL persons, I assign a father whose name is "EOL [surname]". Because many families have surnames that are spelled differently for certain members, I pick the usual spelling as EOL's surname although it really doesn't matter. This groups EOL persons together under one EOL "parent". Once I had all my EOL persons assigned an EOL parent, I began looking at the children assigned to each EOL parent to see if and of the "children" were related. Today, I just finished working on one EOL "family". It had started with three "children" and after some research, I was able to determine how the three "children" were related and now, the EOL father has only the one "child". The last step for the process is changing the GivenName for the EOL parent to "Progenitor". This isn't really necessary but it is a quick way to see which EOL persons have been "cleaned up" In this way, I am combining families and will be able to export just the one family. As noted, I have been able to connect many family branches into a single line. But, I also have many EOL persons with many "children" meaning that each "child" of that EOL person represents a different branch of the family. These branches may still be related although I have no clue how. Of course, they may not be related. For example, my Jones and Wilson lines each have many probably unrelated branches. Some may yet prove related, but it probably won't be many. Like I say, this may work best for a relatively small project. Mine is fairly large at 57,000 persons. So I have over 160 EOL/Progenitor persons. By the way, I only assign and EOL parent if there are at least two or more persons (to start with) of that (or similar) surname. Otherwise, I'd have thousands and not much need for it as most would just be a parent of a spouse, maybe an unrelated person in a census household, or other person unrelated to anyone else in the project. In any case, there are ways such as the above, to "combine" families to allow a more simplified export of data or printing of reports. Lee