Exporting GEDs

[colinc]

As Reunion 9 is not compatible with Spotlight [a long-term gripe of mine] I have exported GEDs so that if the GED of my tree came up in a search I'd know immediately if I had the string in my tree as well as elsewhere.

As a tactic it has not worked well and I have only just realised why: as I have a huge amount of biographical [unstructured] information on people I just put it in Notes. However, I have only just realised that Reunion does not export the contents of that field, all I get is '1 NOTE @N31@' as an example.

My GED is only 240k, while my Family file [which I assume does no actually include the multi-media] is 4.7Mb and I suspect over 250k words of text.

I know Leister do not consider Spotlight important, and it seems not to be required in developer guidelines, but it is the only app I've had since I first started on Macs in the '80s [or whenever search became available in the OS] that does not have it!

Cheers, Colin

[theKiwi]

Re: Exporting GEDs

The GEDCOM file would contain the notes - near the end of the GEDCOM file there should be a section made up of all the NOTE fields identified by their number.

So certainly a word search of the GEDCOM file would reveal what Note it was in, but you'd have to then search again to find what person or family had that note assigned to them.

For example from a GEDCOM file

1 NOTE @N82@

and then lower down in the file (search for N82) you find this

0 @N82@ NOTE
1 CONT Attended the 1960 Houliston Centennial at the Balclutha Showgrounds.
2 SOUR @S12@

so to reverse this, you might have searched for "Balclutha Showgrounds" and found it's in N82, then you can search the GEDCOM file for N82 to find what person that was assigned to.

Roger

[dfilpus]

Re: Exporting GEDs

As a workaround of Reunion's limitations, look at Export>Text. It exports the content of Notes. Then Spotlight should pick up the information in the exported text file. Reunion 9 appears to remember the configuration for the export, so you only need to set it up once.

[B Jansen]

Re: Exporting GEDs

I didn't realize Spotlight doesn't pick up Reunion file info because it picks up mine. Then I realized that what Spotlight finds is the info I want in a search not in the Reunion file itself but in a web card that I have in the public folder of my Dropbox.

You might want to try creating web cards and keeping them on your hard drive for no other reason than to have then searchable in Spotlight if that's useful for you.

[colinc]

Re: Exporting GEDs

Thanks all.

There was nothing at the foot of the GED, but the text export does the trick [although the file is barely human readable] after I added in al the fields not exported by default. This does not matter as all I want it for when I come on, say, an obit, is to check I have it. I've often forgotten I'd already transcribed something, done a search, got a nil return in Spotlight and re-transcribed only to find that it was in Reunion all along.

Problem solved: of course it wound not be a problem if only … and I still have to remember to export from time to time

Cheers, Colin