GeoEng51

Joan, Good to hear that it will help out! I entered the second set of comments on GenMatcher, as I didn't want people thinking I was being a bit negative about it. The more I use it, the more I like it! Its going to become a regular in my stable of genealogy programs, as our family progresses in genealogy work, and we have more and more people working on it. I've had the luxury of doing all of it myself, for many years, and then having my daughter get enthusiastically involved about a year ago. I must say I'd rather deal with these problems, than continue doing all the research on my own.

Just a follow-up comment on GenMatcher - I've worked with it some more, and want to revise my statement about how long it takes to compare files. While it is true that the program makes a comparison on a person-by-person basis, finding differences is very quick. For each person, there might be a list of 5 or 10 lines of information (name, birth, marriage, death, spouse's name, children's names, etc.) Each line is colour coded - green for identical information, red for changed information, yellow for added information. So, if all entries under a particular name are identical, then its "green across the board". If any red or yellow lines show up, there is some difference. So, its pretty easy to just scroll down through each name and quickly look for red or yellow lines - a file with 350 names only took me a couple of minutes. So, this program is a very good, fast way to compare two similar TMG database files.

JNickel, Thanks for all the thoughtful feedback. I know it takes a bit of time to marshall one's thoughts and get them down in a sensible manner, so I appreciate you doing so. I'm hoping this mixup "event" is a one-off, i.e., I had always intended that only one person work on our TMG databases at a time (easy enough to do when I was the only one at it), and that there was always clear notification when this was going to happen. However, I think my daughter got a bit carried away despite our "agreement". The fact that we have to figure out what she did, and recover from it, will (I hope) impose a little of that needed discipline into the process. My kids and wife and I do all access www.myfamily.com, to keep in touch - I think that would be a useful place to regulary archive backup copies of our TMG databases, so that if we have future problems, it is even easier to recover. And we could also use it as a place to give notification of when we are working on a particular database (we have in common) - so before anyone started making any changes, they'd check on the myfamily web site, to see if anyone was already changing that database. If not, they could post a note saying they were. If so, they could contact the other person and arrange to get the latest version. Something like that would work. I think I was the architect of my own downfall here - I was so keen on my daughter using the same genealogy program as I did, that I even bought her a copy of TMG! But I'm just as happy to have a young, ethusiastic person working on my genealogy - I've been neglecting it recently in favour of getting some of my wife's side done. Life progresses - not always at a steady pace, but in fits and starts, with a few dead ends and retractions

Thanks for the feedback, Michael. I had a look through the other threads, and they were all about as I expected - the simple answer being you have to set up some rules about who maintains the database and makes the changes. I did find a program on Cindi's list called GENMatcher (see http://www.mudcreeksoftware.com/), which lets you compare two genealogical database files. They can be two TMG files, or a selection of files of any of the following formats: GEDCOM, PAF 3- 5, TMG 4, 5, 6 and 7, Family Tree Maker, Legacy 3-7 files and RootsMagic. I've tried the program out and it works quite well, but you still have to go through the files person by person, which might be a slow go, if you have a lot of names, or aren't sure which names have been changed.

My apologies if this topic has been addressed already, but I could not find any reference to it by searching the forum. My daughter and I have both been working on my wife's genealogy at the same time. That's the good news. The bad news is that she's been "updating" an old version of my wife's TMG7 project file that I sent her, without checking with me first, so now we have two versions of this file - the one my daughter has been working on, and the one I've been working on. Is there some way to compare and/or synchronize two similar but not identical TMG project files? I don't see access to this kind of function in the TMG menus, nor is it mentioned in the help files. Thanks in advance for any assistance. Cheers.....GeoEng51