Do you know how to merge GEDCOM files?

I am working on my family tree. I now have 971 names on the tree. I plan to add 29 later today just so that I can say that I have an even one thousand.

Now that I am finding other people with GEDCOM files, usually much bigger than mine, I am wondering how to merge them. There must be a way.

Back in 1992 when I was working my book entitled "The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson" I obtained the PAF program from the Family History Library. I put 3000 relatives of Thomas Jefferson into that program plus a small number of less than 20 of my own relatives, which was all I could find at the time.

When I had about 1100 relatives of Thomas Jefferson, I submitted by files to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. That file is now in their archives and I was able to download it online recently. That started by current effort to find my own relatives however distant and I am now up to 971 names.

Tragically, however, when I got up to 3000 relatives of Thomas Jefferson, the program blew up and the marriage data was all gibberish, which reduced my data to rubble. I called Salt Lake and they told me that there was a bug in the PAF program that caused this. They were working on making a patch to fix that bug and would send it to me when it was ready. However, they never did.

As a result, the most complete record of Thomas Jefferson's relatives ever made has been lost. Even the file of 1100 names which I submitted to Salt Lake City contained some errors which I corrected later but the later files with the corrections were lost.

Now, the file of my own relatives is up to 971 names, soon to be one thousand. It is getting to be too big. I would like to merge it with other people's files. Do you know how to do this?

Sam Sloan http://www.anusha.com/sloanjac.htm http://www.anusha.com/sloanjac.ged http://www.samsloan.com/slaves.htm


Here is my family tree: NOTE: These pages were produced by me through the software available from the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. However, I am not a member of that church.

Sam Sloan

My Home Page

Contact address - please send e-mail to the following address: Sloan@ishipress.com