Maintaining Person ID and Family ID on Import?

[tomk]

I am determined to make Reunion 10 work for me. For many years I have been using Legacy Family Tree, and most recently for about 4 years have been running Windows on my Mac using vmware Fusion. I would like to move to a pure Mac environment.

My problem today is how to maintain the Person IDs and Family IDs specified in Legacy Exported GEDCOM to be maintained in Reunion. This is important to me because I export GEDCOMs to load my TNG Website, and many linkages are based on these IDs.

Before I exported from Legacy, I verified that there were no missing RINS (Person IDs) or MRINS (Family IDs). My hope was that these would be maintained in Reunion.

For Person ID's as long as I export the complete list from Legacy and import them to Reunion, the RIN in Legacy appears to be matching the Person ID in Reunion. If I export a GEDCOM that only includes deceased individuals, and then import to Reunion, then the Person ID's are collapsed to be in numeric order. Is there a way to force Reunion to reuse the Person ID on the GEDCOM?

More problematic is the Family ID. There are two problems here:

1) In Legacy, if you had an individual with no partner and no children, then there is not a MRIN (Family ID) in Legacy. In Reunion, it appears that by default all single persons are assigned a Family ID. So in Legacy I have 1694 MRINS, but in Reunion I ended up with 3548 Family IDs. Is there a way to not establish a Family ID for a person imported that has no partner or children?

2) In many cases the Family ID in Reunion is the same as the MRIN in Legacy. However, not in all cases. I have not done an exhaustive search, but what appears to be happening is that if a person had multiple marriages, then the MRIN (Family ID) from Legacy is not maintained in Reunion. What seems to be happening is that the Family ID (MRIN) first marriage is maintained, but the second marriage gets a new Family ID. And the original MRIN (Family ID) no longer exists - i.e. there is no a gap in the Family ID sequence. Is this a bug? or is there away to keep the original Family ID (MRIN).

(UPDATE) on Item 2) above, the problem seems to be more that the List - People Function is displaying the wrong values. See two attached images. The Family ID's are sorted in numeric order on this list, and you can see the outliers: (on attached)
a) Family ID# 1659 is really # 15, and #1659 is associated with his first marriage.
b) Family ID# 934 is really # 29, and #934 is associated with his first marriage. Also on this second image the third #27 listed Family ID is really #28, and it is her second marriage.

Something is not being reflected on the People Listing Report.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Tom Kuehn
Reunion 10.0.2

[Mark]

Re: Maintaining Person ID and Family ID on Import?

Is there a way to force Reunion to reuse the Person ID on the GEDCOM?

No. Reunion will renumber the entries as they get imported.

Is there a way to not establish a Family ID for a person imported that has no partner or children?

No. The way Reunion is designed requires that even individuals with no partner/children have Family ID's.

What seems to be happening is that the Family ID (MRIN) first marriage is maintained, but the second marriage gets a new Family ID. And the original MRIN (Family ID) no longer exists - i.e. there is no a gap in the Family ID sequence. Is this a bug?

Reunion assigns ID #'s (both Family and Person) as the data gets imported, leaving no gaps in the ID #'s. So what you're seeing here sounds like its expected behavior.

You may want to check the Optional Fields tab on import of the GEDCOM, it's possible Legacy exported the RINs and MRINs to a field which you could import into Reunion and potentially export when creating the GEDCOM to upload to TNG.

(UPDATE) on Item 2) above, the problem seems to be more that the List - People Function is displaying the wrong values.

What you're seeing here looks to be a bug, it seems to be sorting on one Family ID# while displaying the other. We'll look into this.

[tomk]

Re: Maintaining Person ID and Family ID on Import?

Thanks Mark for the responses.

The Person ID renumber should not be a problem for me - it just caused problems when I was developing ways to have Legacy GEDCOM play nice with Reunion in a smaller test database. For the most part I don't plan to import GEDCOMs in to Reunion once I complete conversion.

The Extra Family ID's assigned to non-married persons without children does not appear to be causing problems as they do not appear to be exported by Reunion on GEDCOMs to upload to TNG.

I was mainly concerned about the incorrect Family IDs that showed up on the People Listing. But as I realized before I submitted my original post, the Family ID is correct in the database, but not displayed correctly in the People Listing. Since it appears this is a bug, I will work on my other conversion issues.