Re: Will this work?

Michael Ionescu|Karlsruhe wrote:
> Bob,
> 
> first off, Gedcom is a perl programming library, not a finished program.
> You have to create a perl program to make use of it.
> 
> You might want to consider going at the problem differently: If there is
> a program that can convert your TSV files to GED, you'll only be faced
> with the quite common task of merging two trees instead of creating a
> specialized program. If there isn't, you can do it with Gedcom -
> depending on whether your TSV files are internally consistent. But it
> will take quite a bit of perl programming.
> 
> Once you have the two GED files, use some standard tool to perform the
> merge. This is a task virtually all genealogists are faced with at some
> point, so there is ample discussion of the subject to be found on the net.
> 
> For pruning you will probably also find a standard program to do the
> job, depending on what you mean by immediate family. That's much more
> efficient than programming your own pruning tool using perl/Gedcom.

Yes, I realize it is a Perl module. That doesn't bother me as I have 
been writing applications with Perl for more than ten years. I just 
wanted to make sure it was possible to get where I want to go. The 
external documentation is not at all clear on its capabilities. They 
talk about reading GED files but not creating or writing them.

The TSV files were created by copy and paste from a related family 
report on familytreemaker.genealogy.com. They are consistent across the 
set, but not specific to any application I am familiar with. I kept the 
labels in the header line on each page when I copied them. Just 
converting them into a GED file would be a good first step. This is 
where I was interested in using Gedcom. I also need to include 
references to that source and the distant cousin that posted the data there.

The GED file I have came from one of my sisters. Years ago she was 
playing with Family Tree Maker and had access to documents our paternal 
grandfather had collected while tracing his lineage back to Ireland. It 
contains all of my siblings, many of our cousins on that side, and most 
of our children, but only a few of our grandchildren. I need to grow 
that in several different directions. But I am trying to avoid having to 
add those several hundred records by hand when they are already 
available online.

I recently installed Gramps 3.1.2 to manipulate the GED file. I have 
some problems with it as it is very different from version 2.0.12 which 
I used several years back, but it is still the best application I have 
tried so far. Part of my problem is that I still don't know my way 
around it very well, so some operations seem awkward yet. I don't know 
if it can merge multiple files, nor how good it will be at pruning them. 
I simply haven't gotten that far with it.

Thank you,

Bob McConnell
N2SPP