Merge two trees together by a marrriage

Question

Hi, My wife and I both have our family trees on FamilyEcho.com.  I was curious if I could merge the two trees together?  I don't want to have to re-enter everyone from her tree into my tree manually.  It would be cool if I could just say "this person and this person are the same in both trees merge here"

Answer 1

You should try sharing the trees with each other, then it should be simple to merge them. If not contact Family Echo.

Answer 2

Billkamm did that work for you? I'm curious also.

Answer 3

You can do this, but it's kind of tricky, and unfortunately the merged tree with lose any photos you may have, which will need to be reimported.

First, ensure there are no duplicate people between the trees, except one of you should appear as the spouse of the other on *one* of the trees only. This person will be used as the connector.

Now in each tree in a browser lke Firefox/Explorer (not Safari/Chrome), click on the connector person, and see the 5-character ID that appears in the browser URL, after the colon (:) - copy both of these to a text document.

Now download both families as FamilyScript. Then open each FamilyScript in a text editor and search-and-replace the 5 character ID that you found for the connector in that tree with something new like JOIN1. (You should check this ID is not already used in the FamilyScript, but you'd be really unlucky if it was!)

You'll probably also need to search-and-replace the ID START in one of the trees with some other ID, since it was probably used in both trees for a different person (unless it so happens that the connector person was the founder of one of the trees).

Finally you should be able to combine the two pieces of FamilyScript together into one file, then import it into a new tree in Family Echo, and you should have a combined family.

BTW I do understand it's not necessarily worth all this bother for you, but hopefully someone might find it useful!

Comments

Brilliant! This works! Thanks Gidgreen. You just saved us a ton of time!

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Thank you so much! Just managed to merge my and my husband's trees together in no time :)

Answer 4

If your trees have several duplicate people, you might have to use another tree editing program to help you, as that can be really confusing to do by hand. I found this way: Download and install GRAMPS ( https://gramps-project.org/ ), which can merge people in a tree. Export GEDCOM files for the trees you want to merge. Import both GEDCOM files into one family tree in GRAMPS. Merge the duplicate persons by selecting the pairs one by one in the persons list and clicking the merge button. After all pairs have been merged, export the tree as GEDCOM files from GRAMPS, and reimport them into a new FamilyEcho tree. As said, you might lose some details like photos, but your trees are merged.

Answer 5

Don't know if someone is still looking this up in 2022, but there have been a few changes.

- You have to remplace the character ID of the 2 people you want to merge in the text files ( before you only had to do the main one but now each character has his parents and spouse ID next to him, you have to remplace that to or the 2 people won't merge)

- For the START person in the second file ( the one that you have to change ID of), same thing, change all of their old IDs, or the 1st file START person (the one you want for your final tree) will end up being connected to their spouse/ children

Comments

I guess it also works for distant relatives (like cousins with mutual great-great-great-...-grantparent)?

Answer 6

If you've come across this thread and these messages didn't answer your question, you might want to search for "merge GEDCOM files". This is a pretty common thing for people to want to do, and you'll find a lot of links to read. 
 

There are also programs that are made just to merge GENCOM files. Here's one: https://www.genmerge.com/