Well, the file has grown to over 46,000 people now. After I put the data up on the My-GED server, and from mailing lists (mainly in Indiana), I was receiving data faster than I could get it all sorted out.  Most of the data wasn't from direct descendants of Thomas, but rather from other families that were included in the file, since they married into the family also.  As things were starting to get a little out of control, I figured I better start doing a better job of documenting things, and then I thought I might as well let everybody else know also.  It could either be of use to you other researchers, let some of you know who have been sending me information (or thinking about sending me information) of some of the steps I've taken to ensure some privacy, or some of you may have a better way for me to do things.  My main issues were:

1. Include the notes with the data submitted to My-GED, making the data more useful to others.
2. Needed a way to document which indivuals were being added to the main file from other GEDCOM's, and who I received the information from.
3. Ensure that as much as practically possible, I wasn't sending out any "private" information.

Point 1 was addressed by experimentation.  I discovered that with my "current" version of Family Tree Maker (ver. 3.02), that if I exported the data to a ver. 5.5 GEDCOM, the notes were not visible.  I next tried exporting to a ver. 4 GEDCOM and the notes became visible.

Point 2.  After merging in GEDCOM's, I soon discovered that there was NOT any way to tell who was added from what GEDCOM or who the original submitter was.   Manually going through each and every individual in every submitted GEDCOM was out of the question, as that was just too much work.  It was already taking an average of a week per GEDCOM, merging obvious duplicate records, checking the data, finding various spellings and "standardizing" them, adding a birth date to these newly "standardized" names, and merging the next batch of duplicates.  After surfing the web for a while, I discovered a program called Add Note ( http://www.rootsweb.com/~gumby/ged.html ) that would allow me add a note to EVERY individual in a GEDCOM, thereby documenting where the data for that person came from.

Point 3. At the same web site as above, I also found a program called GED Living.   This program will replace the birth date information of everybody without a death date born after whatever date you tell it (I try to use 1900).  I've tried several programs similar to this, but they all entailed me doing something like putting a "marker" in a field like "Fact 1" for everybody I thought might be alive. This was a lot of work.  GED Living will also let me remove the notes from each individual that was marked as possibly being alive.  This was important, as many of the notes for living individuals contained things like addresses and phone numbers, along with some data that living individuals might object to being published on the web.

The Add Note and GED Living programs have saved me countless hours of work, and have added a new dimension to publishing and gathering additional family data.

The URL of this page is: []
Contact: [Bill Ferguson (wbfergus@home.com)]