47. Splitting and Combining Files in RootsMagic

well welcome to today's rootsMagic webinar my name is Michael booth 9 vice-president rootsMagic and one of its developers and also with us this evening is the roots magician himself Bruce Busby and Bruce of course as the president roots magic and its author now while it's magic file can hold mult while a roots magic file can hold multiple trees and branches of your family history you sometimes may find it necessary to split a large database or combine several databases into one and tonight we'll show you how you can do both and with that I'll turn the time over to Bruce hey thanks for joining us ok um what we're going to talk about here today is is how to split a big database into smaller databases how to maybe remove a line from your file and that kind of involves the splitting the database and and also how to combine files so if I have more than one database that I want to try to combine in and make a bigger one then we're going to talk about how you how we can do that as well so let's go ahead and get started what I have is just a sample database this is our our usual sample not Nam real people file and so what I want to do is the first thing I want to talk about is splitting a line out in other words I've got my database right here and I want to take another law a part of this database and create a new database with just that part split a little piece of that out so there there's several ways you can do things like this one of those is to use gedcom gedcom is a file format that witch that you can export it import data back in and so I could go up to file and then go down to export and export a gedcom file and select the people I want and then go create a new blank database and import that line in okay but we're not going to talk about that we do have another webinar where we talk about working with files working with gedcom files I'm going to show you the easier way to do this so the first thing I want to do is I want to create a new database in other words I want to take one of these lines let's say I want to take this Thomas K Jones and his ancestors and I want to create a new database with just that line or maybe maybe flora Dell a lot of times you may have a database of yourself and somebody wants to get a copy of a file that has just your father's line or just your mother's line so let's say they want just your mother's line well let's see how we can do that the first thing I'm going to do is create a new database because I want a new rootsMagic file to put this into so I'm going to say new database and I'm gonna call this mom's line you can call it whatever you want but that's what I'm going to call it when I do that rootsMagic is going to create a new database a blank database called mom's line right here okay now watch carefully because this is really complicated okay it's it's not I'm just I'm just teasing here I want to take flora del Jones and her line and put it in this database so I'm gonna click on flora del and I'm going to while my mouse is down I'm gonna click and drag her over to this database this new blank database and rootsMagic is going to say who do you want to copy to this new date to this other database and I could copy just her what I want is I want to copy her ancestors although I also want the children so that the children of each of those ancestors in other words what would be on the family group sheet for each of those ancestors that's what I actually want now I have other options I can do the descendants of her I can do everybody in the same tree as her I can do everyone in the entire database or I can say bring me up that list to select from because all I want to do is bring over people whose last name is Smith who were born after 1880 so I can do that but for right now for our purposes I just want the ancestors and it can choose how many generations so if I actually only wanted a couple generations I could do that but I can leave this at some high number to get as many generations as I want I click OK and there we are I have now copied flora del Jones and her ancestors over into this tree now it doesn't look quite like I did if you look at this it's showing this Sarah Kay the Sarah Ann Kaye rather than flora del Jones and that's because what rootsMagic does is when I bring somebody over into a new database rootsMagic just says well I don't really know who should be the starting person so I'm just going to pick the person with the lowest record number and so the Sarah Ann Kaye was was probably another child in here somewhere and she was entered before flora del was now if I want flora del to be this starting person I just make sure to set her as the root person and the way I can do that is make sure this is the database that's selected go to tools and come down here to the file options and I have an option right here root person you can see right now it's Sarah Ann Kaye but the one person I want is flora del Jones I'm going to click that and I'm going to go down here and I'm going to select flora del Jones she is now the root person although I do have two I do actually have to do the control home to actually select it so there she is flora del Jones and Thomas and Myra just like we have here this entire line is now in this database so that is how I can split out a line from my main large database into a new database just create the new database drag and drop the person and choose which people I actually want to go right in there okay now as I mentioned there are several other options that I can do for this let me go ahead and I'm going to delete this database I'm going to create another new database and I'm going to call this Smith's okay so this database is called this new blank database is called Smith's so now when I want to bring somebody over I can pick anybody it doesn't really matter I can drag and drop somebody and then instead of picking just this person I can say I want everyone or I want to let me select people from a list and when I do that rootsMagic brings up a list this is a list of everybody in my main database okay and so I want to mark all the Smiths that I want a database with just dismiss but you can see I actually have quite a few Smith's here and I really don't feel like going down here and going check check check yet I want to go have to go through and check them one at a time so I can say I want to mark a group of people and when I do that it says what group of people do you want and I can select a person's family or ancestors or descendants but I want to do to select people by their data feels okay and that's gonna bring up this this kind of scary-looking screen but it's not scary at all what what I'm doing is I'm telling it which people how to how to decide which people to mark and so I can select a field in the field I want to select is the surname okay that's the last name and then I can say the surname equals or does not equal or or is less than or greater than or is blank or whatever so I'm just gonna keep it with equals Smith okay in other words mark everybody whose surname equals Smith and I can get fancier I can say and or this and or this and or this but I'm happy with just surname equals Smith click OK then it says it's marked thirty-five people and if I you scroll you'll see it's basically anybody whose last name was Smith is now marked click OK copied the people and now on this database the only people that I have are going to be the Smiths so if I go in and look at here you'll see this database that's all I have are just Smith's and yeah that's all I've got right there so I can I can use this drag and drop to copy data from my main database into another in almost any kind of fashion that you can think of you know I can I can bring over a line I can bring over you know infer people based on criteria or so on now there's one last trick that I want to show you and I'm going to go ahead and delete this one right here again we're gonna we're gonna go ahead and delete this this database we just created and once again I'm going to create a new database and I'm gonna call this one mom's line this is this is this kind of the same name but there's there's a trick that I want to show you here and and kind of a mention of a gotcha so sometimes sometimes you may have more collateral lines than than just in other words if I wanted to bring Florida if I wanted to bring her over into this new database when I do this drag and drop I have the options of the ancestors you know which just gets me dad mom the grandparents the great-grandparents and so on or ancestors and their children now what that doesn't get is if their children were also married it doesn't get those spouses if those children if their spouses parents were entered it doesn't get those either it gets just the parents grandparents great-grandparents and then the aunts and uncles that's all it yes which most of the time that's probably all you really are interested in but sometimes you may want to get all of those other collateral lights in other words once you go and get Thomas and you get Thomas William Jones well you're going to get all of Thomas K Jones's brothers and sisters as well no problem but if those brothers and sisters were married you're not going to get those spouses or the spouses parents or anything so let's say I do want them well what I need to do is when I do the drag and drop want to do this option everyone in the same tree as flora del Jones because what that's going to do is that is going to go kind of brute force through and get everybody connected to her tree so as that goes up that's going to get her father and her grandfather and then it's going to get all the brothers and sisters and then it's going to get the spouses than the parents and everything the problem with that though is that since it's getting everybody in her tree it's also going to go up and get her son and then it's going to go and get her son her husband and her husband's family so at that point all of a sudden you're getting basically the whole database which is not what you want so if you want to get all of those collateral lights what you'll need to do is before you drag and drop flora del you're going to need to unlink her from this family so that it doesn't go get her son and her father are in her husband and so I can actually highlight highlight her and I can come back up to edit unlink from spouse and rootsMagic is going to come up and say do you want her to unlink from this family in other words do I want to unlink her from Howard and James and the other children let me say yes okay so now I have just her and her and her parents and all of this line along with all the spouses and children spouses and all of them all of those collateral line are in here she's just not connected to that other half of a tree and so at this point I can drag and drop her and then say everyone in the same tree is flora del and when I do that that's going to get me all of these others and for some reason it went ahead and it went ahead and got okay it went ahead and got her got the rest of them somehow and and that's going to be that's going to be gotcha and this particular database may have this problem yeah if that other line is connected through cousin marriages up in the tree once again it will it will come back it will come back through through there so flora del what's happening is there's going to be a link up here somewhere where it is linking into this into the other half of this family so that's that's what's going to that's what's going to be happening right there okay but and so so if you have if you have cousin marriages up in your tree this becomes a lot tougher and it may be more work than it's worth trying to actually pull that out separately you might actually be better off just doing the ancestors with the children okay so let me go ahead and I need on my main database once I've done that I need to go back in and I need to link her well let me go let me go delete this database first get it out of the way here once once you've brought them over her her husband and children are still in this file and so I need to link her back in so the way I would do that is I would highlight her and I would say add a spouse and I need to select an existing person and that selected selected person was Howard Howard Smith jr. and I'm going to say maybe there was a marriage maybe there wasn't I don't happen to know it so I've done that and that has linked her back into that family okay so so that basically gives me it links me back back in the family just be careful when you do this make sure that when you when you unlink somebody from their family write down the information about who they were linked to to make sure you actually get them linked back into the right place I think I actually probably linked her end up back to the wrong person here because I'm not seeing the seeing the children right here so I'm pretty sure I've linked her back back to the wrong person but that's fine we can continue to work with this from here okay so next next thing we want to do let's say I want to actually I'm going to do it this way Howard Smith I'm gonna say add a spouse and I'm gonna pick Joe's flora Dell okay it says there already it's let's go ahead and what we're gonna do is we are going to delete this this fake family okay okay I'm not sure why that's not doing that but let's go ahead let's go ahead and move on to the removing a line removing a line from your file so let's say I've got this particular file and I want to create a file that has this particular line but I don't want this anymore what we did last him previously is we actually went through and said I've got a database here and I want to split out some data to another database and when I split that data out to that other file it remained in my main file in other words it didn't move it out and put it in the other file what again is it just created a file that had a copy of that other information that's what's splitting your data out now there may be times when you actually want to delete information from from particular file and so I'm going to show you how to do that now we don't have rootsMagic does not have a way to select Phoebe and say delete her and all of her ancestors that would be a tech support nightmare for us because we would have a lot of people we know who would do that and then call us and say I didn't really want to delete that and unfortunately there's not a way for us to tell them how to get this stuff they just the massive amount of names that they just deleted back into their file so there's a trick to crit to removing a line and that trick is to create a copy of your database okay in other words make a copy of your database but don't include the lines you don't want okay and let me let me show you what I mean by that I'm going to go in and what I want is this this this tree right here without this blue line I want to get rid of that blue line so I'm gonna go up and I'm gonna create a new blank database and I'm going to call this removed line okay so now again I have my blank database here and what I want is I'm basically going to create a copy of this file without this line okay and then this new file will be my database that doesn't have this line in it anymore so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and drop and it doesn't matter I can drag and drop anybody I want because the option I'm going to choose is let me select people from a list okay and from that list I'm going to be able to select the people I actually want so I'm going to do that rootsMagic is going to bring up that list of people right there and that's everybody in my database and so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to say mark everyone in the database okay so what you're seeing is every single name is checked so if I were to click OK right here what it would do is it would make an exact copy of my database it would copy every person over there but what I want is I want every person except for Phoebe and her ancestors so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go down to Phoebe Davis and she's gonna be right here Phoebe Sofia Davis I'm going to highlight her and I'm going to say unmarked people and I'm going to say unmarked ancestors so I'm unmarked those ancestors I'm unmarked in that line that I don't want anymore and when I do that you'll see it has now her and her parents and all of those folks have been unmarked so the people that are now checked is everybody in the file except for Phoebe and her ancestors so when I say ok ok it's copied them over and here is my database it's the full database except it does not have this line in it anymore ok so that is how you can go and create a copy of your database that's missing a particular line so if you haven't have a database and there's there's some information in there that you haven't really wanted to continue to be in there that's how you can do it whether it's marking everybody that's the way you'll start and then unmarked in a line or saying everybody whose last name is Smith I don't want them in my file anymore you put in that case you would drag and drop you would select everybody and then you would go in and say unmarked people based on their data and then unmarked everybody whose surname equals Smith and that will give you a copy of your database except it will strip out everybody whose last name is Smith okay so that's how you can actually go in and remove a line from your file okay so so that we have a question does that eliminate the ancestors children in the in what I did when I did it it didn't because I only selected two unmarked the direct ancestors but there if I had selected two unmarked the ancestors and their children then that would have removed the ancestors children as well okay and and you can get you can you can get as as detailed as you want when doing this you know because once I have that list of everybody in my database I can and once I've marked everybody anybody that gets unchecked those folks won't get moved over to the new files so I could go in and say unmarked this person and their ancestors I could go in and say you know unmarked this person and their descendants as well and so I could I can take multiple steps so Ike and then I could go in and say oh I got this one straggler who still checked you know and I can just go uncheck them so anybody that's unchecked when I say okay is going to be left out when I when it copies this this information over now there was a question earlier on and I probably ought to cover that right now they were asking when I do this drag-and-drop does it bring over citations and pictures and things like that the answer is yes when I drag and drop a person or a group of people it's going to bring over everything about that person it's going to bring over all of their facts it's going to bring over there their sources or citations that media they're to do this you know it's going to bring over all of those particular things now the one place that it won't is if I for example were to drag and drop Howard Smith senior over here and say only him in other words I don't bring over anybody except for Howard Smith senior if I do that any family facts that he has with BB those won't come over because I didn't have BB come over and since by bringing over Howard without BB the family record does not come over and therefore anything that belongs to the family like family events like marriages and divorce and engagement and family pictures those would not come over so if I want the family events to come over I need to make sure I bring over the spouse as well okay the question why would you want to delete a line probably the main reason you would you want to do that is if you've imported a gedcom file from somebody and you happen to find that it had more information more lines in there than you actually were interested in and so you wanted to get rid of those lines that's that's one reason it's probably a number of a number of reasons as well okay the final thing we're going to talk about is combining files in other words I have two different files and they each have some information but they don't both have all the information and honestly I can actually use this these two files I have up here as an example so what I would do is I would actually open up the two files that I'm interested in open them up side-by-side and the only thing I have to do to do that is just go to the file menu and click on open when I do file open it will open up the new file side-by-side with whatever file I already have open and then again like when we were doing splitting I can use drag and drop to combine files okay so if I had two files and they had completely independent information but I wanted to put them both in the same file I could do that I could highlight a person drag him over to the other database and then say I want everybody in the database and click OK and rootsMagic would bring everybody in this database and put them into this database now when I do that rootsMagic is going to just drop all of those names in the new database it's not going to try to connect them together because it has no idea how the people in this file are related to the people in this file because you haven't told it you've just brought a bunch of names over now there are situations where rootsMagic can go ahead and link the files together because you can give it enough information so for example let's say I want to bring Phoebe in other words this file is one where I created it and I stripped out Phoebe Davis and her in her line well I have it over here let's say what I want is I want to bring Phoebe in her line into my database well instead of just clicking on Phoebe and dragging her and just dropping her randomly I can drag her and drop her on the location where she needs to go in other words I can say I can drop her at the Mun the motor slot if she happens to be the mother here I'm gonna drag her and I'm gonna say I want the ancestors now when I do that when I drag a person and drop them on a particular slot I'm going to get an option down here in the past what I've been showing you this options always been blank but right now rootsMagic is saying is the person you dropped the mother of Howard Smith jr. and if she is I'm going to say yes if you check this box roots magic will automatically add her as the mother in this family which means when I click OK Lutz Magic's going to basically drag and drop copy that line over into this database and then add her as the mother so it's gonna link her in so let's go ahead and do that okay and there she is so when I drag and drop a person from one database into another database it's going to give me that option now there are some cases where where it may not it won't do that because because it may not make sense for it to do that now one thing that's really nice is that this works from all of the views it's not limited to just this pedigree view this is what we have happened to be working on but we're not limited to be do using it just on the pedigree view so for example if I happen to go to a family view right here and I have some children right here let's just pick somebody this is this is not this is not you know real so it doesn't really matter how we kind of mangle lease these files up in this case you'll want to be more careful with your real data obviously but let's say that this Uriah Davis happened to be a child in this family well I can click and drag Uriah and it doesn't matter which screen I drag it from I can click and drag your ayah and drop him into the child area and then I could say I want to copy just Uriah and is Uriah the child of Howard and Phoebe and if I say yes okay it has not only brought him over but it's added him and as a child so this works from any of the views it works from the pedigree view the family view the descendant view you know so any place where it makes sense to be able to do this it will let you do that and I can drag from a particular view so if I'm in a family over here if I'm in this family view and I see that Elizabeth right here was the mother of doctor Jane Smith I can drag her from here and drop her ear and it's going to say as Elizabeth the mother of James Smith I'm not going to do this because I don't want to mangle the state of bass too badly but I could check that and rootsMagic would take Elizabeth and add her in as the mother right here now there's also situations where where you may have other information so I'm actually going to let's go ahead and delete this this one here again and I've got another database right here called Maine - okay this particular database this particular database James Smith is Howard's father so in in theory I could click on James and drag and drop him up to the father slot okay and and and that's what we've shown you how to do before but let's say let's say I'm going to add a new person right here okay I'm going to add this person right here and so I got James snow so this James Smith well that's not what I wanted I wanted him to be named Howard okay this is Howard so this Howard is the same as this Howard in other words because we have James up here and we have Howard up here I'm going to if I if I drag James up to here you're gonna notice I have this option if you check this box rootsMagic will add James as the father but let's say I drag Howard well if I drag Howard I don't want to drop him on a an empty spot I want to drop him on a copy of him that's already in the database and when I do that it's going to say are these two Hallett's the same person and if I check this and I'm not going to because it's gonna bring in Ruth and Mills and so that would be a duplicate a lot of that information if I were to check this and do this what it's going to do is it's going to bring over this line into my database and then it's going to merge this Howard with this Howard and so it's going to link up that way okay okay so we have a question here if I mess up and delete someone can I just reload the database the answer to that is no because when you delete the person it's deleting them out of the fount of the file on the disk so what we advise is before you try any of this stuff that that I'm showing you the very very very very first thing you should do is go up here to the file menu and go down here to backup okay make a backup of your database before you start ever doing anything with the splitting and combining but especially combining because combining you're actually making changes to your actual database splitting you're not splitting you're taking information from your database and copying it into another blank database and so your original database is fine removing a line from your file which was the second thing we showed you're you're actually creating a new file that has all of your data without the information that you don't want but your original file is still okay but when you get to combining that basically involves adding information into your file that type of thing before you do that I strongly encourage making making a backup of your database before you do that and Gayle yes that was a good question so thank you okay um now let's say let's say I do have some duplicate some duplicate people in here so for example I'm going to take I'm gonna take let's see what's the best way to do this me okay I've got James James and Daniel and so James right here I think James is Howard's father James is Howard's father so what I'm going to do is before what you saw me do was take James and drop him on to the father slot so that rootsMagic would automatically add him as the father but let's say I don't I didn't act don't actually drop him on the father slot for some reason I didn't think about doing that or I've done right or or I've I dropped him there and I forgot to say he's the father I forgot to say that James in 1830 is the father I forgot to check that okay what will happen is it will bring J it brings brought James and that line over but it didn't add him as the father and rootsMagic can still handle that and what you can do is there's two different options either I can right here I can say click to add father or I can highlight Howard Smith senior and go up here and say add parents when I say add parents it's going to say do you want to add the spouse to this existing family in other words do you want to add it to the family that has Ruth is the mom and Howard Smith as their as a son and all these other children and I can say yes add to that family and when I click on that it's asking me now to add that father it's saying okay let's go ahead and add this father now yeah I hadn't already dragged James over I could say add a new person and I could type in his name and dates and all of that but he's in this file because I dragged him over there you just don't see him because I didn't link him in so I'm gonna say I want to select an existing person I was select James in 1830 who's already in there and okay that's the one right there James Smith from 1830 that's the father I want I'm selecting him and that links him in so if I have when you're combining files if you use gedcom or whatever or whatever and you bring data over from one database into another and they are not connected the add commands these add commands add spouse add parents and add child they all have two options add as the new person which is the one you're usually used to using because that's where you're typing in that new person you just found but there's also the select existing person which you can think of as the lake so the add command lets you add a new person add a new spouse add a new child add new parents or it lets you link a father a mother or a spouse in that's already happens to be floating around in the file so always keep in mind that that command can be used to link people together in your file that are already linked together I mean they're already in the file but not linked together now last thing I want to show you when you're doing combining and it doesn't matter whether you're doing combining kind of the way we have been let me go ahead and close this one it doesn't matter whether you're combining by importing a gedcom in or whether you're combining in by dragging and dropping people there's always a chance you can end up with duplicate records with more than one of the same person okay now if you have that's come up it's it's what's called it's what's called duplicate records and under tools that's what merge is for that's what your merge options are for and we have a webinar on merging so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that but there are three merges there's the automatic merges which are the ones that will just go through and take care of a lot of a lot of the the really obvious ones for you there's the duplicate search merge which is where rootsMagic will say these look like they're duplicates but you have to tell me whether you want me to actually merge them and then there's manual merge where you go pick any two records and say merge them the way I recommend doing this is start with the automatic merges they're easy just select the automatic merges just go ahead and leave these all checked say begin merge and boom that's that's it it's taken care of a big chunk of the duplicates in my database for me okay the real obvious ones the ones that come from you know dragging and dropping people it will get a lot of those okay after you've done the automatic merges go do the duplicate search merge numbers just step down through this list do the duplicate search merge and just go ahead and choose the default options as you get as you get braver you can you can go decide what what other information you want in order for it to look for those duplicates tell it to search and you can see I don't have anymore duplicates in this file or at least no duplicates that that rootsMagic can find because the automatic one took care of all of those for me okay let me go ahead ooh oh okay this is an error in fact I have a question from somebody asking about putting their database on Dropbox okay this is a reason why I actually usually do not put my database in Dropbox I happen to for this demo but usually I don't because Dropbox will sometimes lock your database while you're using it and give you an error like that so let me go ahead and get out of this one no first and I want to go open-open another one because I think there's some duplicates in here so I'm going to go to tools and go to that duplicate search okay actually I guess there weren't any in there if you do the duplicate search and merge what you'll see is a list of possible duplicates the two people and you can go down through the list and highlight it and you can look at all the details on them and then you can say go ahead and merge them once you once you've done the automatic merges and gone through the duplicate search merge and merge the ones that have found if you stumble across records that are duplicates and and rootsMagic has not said that they're possible duplicates there's usually a reason usually if there's if they have a different birthdate rootsMagic will say the birth dates are different or are different enough that that it couldn't figure out that they were duplicates and that's what the manual merge is for that's where you can actually go select any two records you select the one record select the other record and then merge it so that's the one completely automatic you've got to do it all you've got to pick the duplicates and then you've got to merge it the duplicate search it picks the duplicates but you have to do them actually do the merge and automatic merges it picks the duplicates and it does the merge but that's what you can do when you're when you're doing a lot of combining in order to you know to get rid of those duplicates that you're finding in your database okay so let's go ahead and see if there's any other any other questions let's see let's go down through here okay like I say I had how do you save your file to Dropbox what I do like I say I do not keep my live database in Dropbox because of that fact that Dropbox will sometimes try to lock your file while you're working on it and give you weird little messages like that I do though keep my backups in Dropbox I used to keep my backups on a flash drive so I used to actually go up and say file and then backup and I used to actually right here where it asked where do I want to do my backups I used to use a flash drive but I don't do that anymore I actually keep this keep my backups in Dropbox the reason for that is because that way one my backup is not sitting here in my house so if my house burns down and my backup is on my flash drives its sticky in the computer you know it doesn't matter that it's not on my hard drive my backup is gone as well if I make my backup to Dropbox if my house burns down and my computer melts my backup file is still up on Dropbox and if I've actually got other computers that are on Dropbox as well my backup is on them as well so I do use Dropbox for my backups but I don't use Dropbox for my live database and you saw why some people keep their database on Dropbox and have no problems and if it works for you great but again like with combining make sure you keep good backups because the last thing you want is for Dropbox to go in and lock your database and actually possibly even corrupt your database you know so make sure you keep good backups okay other questions is there an undo for the drag and drop operation the answer to that is there that's what backup is yeah that'll that backup will be we'll be your your undo there isn't something that goes and says undo this because of the fact that every time you make a change to your database it physically changes the file on your disk backup becomes almost impossible backup and I mean excuse me I knew becomes almost impossible because it would have to undo physical rights to the data file on your disk okay word processors spreadsheets those are great for undo because all your data sits in memory until you actually save it and so that it's easy to undo stuff that's in memory but once it's committed to disk that becomes a much much harder job so but doing a backup is kind of your it's kind of your undo if you if something messes up you can restore that backup okay somebody asked said also said they have a file a file for their wife and one from them is this how you would combine these files and the answer is yes if you want your two files to be combined into a single one which by the way I personally that's the way I do it my wife and my file data is in the same file it just makes it easier to do things like print pedigree charts and ancestor reports for our kids as opposed to having those in different files there's nothing wrong with keeping your data in separate files I'm just saying that's the way I personally do it but that doesn't necessarily make it the right way to do that if I want to break my husband's family from mind what's the easiest way to do it so see that's the exact opposite so that's how you would do it using that splitting a line out actually we talked about removing a line from your file basically the best way if you actually want have a database that has for example yours and your spouse's line in the same file and you want to create two files one of yours and one of your spouse's the easiest way to do that is to open your database create a blank one like we just like we before drag-and-drop your line from your database into that other one okay then create a second database and drag and drop your spouse's line from your database into that other one that the advantage of that is your database that's combined is still still there you don't have to worry about it didn't it didn't get corrupted or anything but you now have a line that has your husband or your spouse's line and then has your line separate one with your line if all you have been tracking in your file is basically your ancestry and and their children then the selecting the ancestors and their children is enough if you've been following a bunch of collateral lines then you're going to need to do the option that I mentioned of unlinking yourself from your spouse and unlinking your spouse from that family before you do it and then copy then drag all the persons in that person's tree to get all those collateral lines and again as I mentioned if you and your husband have ancestors that were married you know in other words you had you you had part of your line merges in with with their line that becomes a million times harder job to do and in that case I do recommend having both lines in the same file so if you and your spouse if your lines merge out their ways into the same line it is much easier just to keep both lines in that same file because as you find those shared names out there you only have to enter once instead of separately in each of your files okay let's see if there's any others when will we post this webinar as soon as it's available we will I don't know exactly when that's going to be posted okay if you don't use live files this is a good question if you don't use live files on Dropbox how do you use the iPad app with Dropbox basically uh when you use the iPad iPad app it has a you know it creates a folder in your Dropbox folder it creates one under apps slash rootsMagic and I just copy my file into there so in other words I work with my file on my hard drive not in Dropbox and if I want to basically put an updated version up there to sync what I can do is don't do file backup don't back up into that app slash rootsMagic folder because the iPad app does not read the back up what you can do is come here and you copy okay under the file menu you select copy and then you go into your into your apps flash rootsMagic and give it a file name and you would save it right there and what that does is that keeps my file where it is on my hard drive but it makes a copy of that file up there on Dropbox for the iPad app to find okay um it looks like it looks like most of the other questions I'm seeing are either not related to to this or or are copies of ones we've already at we've already answered so I hope this has been informative to you hopefully you feel a little bit better in your understanding of how to split a line out of your database how to remove a line from your file or how to combine how to combine files into into a single single larger file and then be able to use the merge features to get rid of any duplicates and to use drag and drop to minimize the amount of duplicates that you're going to end up with because if you create a gedcom file and import that in your you're guaranteed to have a lot of duplicates by using drag-and-drop and specifying where on the tree it goes and which group of people you actually want to copy over to the new you will greatly reduce the number of duplicates that you end up having so again thanks for joining us and we'll see it again at our next webinar

Channel: RootsMagic

Views: 4,362

Rating: 4.483871 out of 5

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Id: lzr3hI6lFSM

Length: 51min 10sec (3070 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2018