Creating a family file when married

[Janeen]

Hello, just wanted to know the best way to enter records of my family and my husbands. Should I create two separate reunion family files (databases) for each of our families or combine them? I'd like to create some reports and charts for my sisters but only of our family. But also in the future, I'd like to combine my family records with my husband's to make a genealogy chart for our children? What would make the most sense? Any advice would be a great help!

Thanks!

[dfilpus]

Re: Creating a family file when married

There has been general opinion that one family file is the best way to go.
It is much easier to generate reports from individual branches of a file than to merge two files together after considerate development as separate files.
Many families will have cross marriages between what appeared at first to be separate family trees. My great grandmother on my father's side married the grandfather of my cousins on my mother's side. If I had split those trees, then I would have to merge them or have persons duplicated in the two files. Minimally, you, your spouse and your children will be duplicated in both files.
In Reunion, sources in each file are treated as separate entities. When you merge the files, you will have duplicate sources, which you will have to match and merge to eliminate the duplicates.

[Bob White]

Re: Creating a family file when married

And the other side of the coin that "dfilpus" flipped is that the duplicate entries and sources mentioned caused you to double your work to get the same information into two separate files. One file is enough to keep you hooked on genealogy!

[Janeen]

Re: Creating a family file when married

Thanks so much for the helpful advice! Just to be clear, if I have one family file with both me and my husband's family members, you say I will be able to easily create charts and reports filtered with just my side of the family or his?

[suzivegemite]

Re: Creating a family file when married

In short, yes.
I used to have 4 different family files. It took a great deal of effort to keep them all up to date. I merged mine after following advice from this site and have never looked back Reunion has customizable reports to suit any needs. You will always find someone on this site that can help you achieve the results you want if you can't figure it out yourself. I'm constantly blown away by how much some people know about Reunion, and their willingness to help.
S

[dfilpus]

Re: Creating a family file when married

Whenever you create a report or chart, there is an option to only include marked people (and sometimes their spouses). There are a ton of tools to create marked groups, such as those related by blood, those connected to one spouse of a couple, etc. The basic process is to unmark all of the people in the family file, mark the desired group and then go through the group adding and deleting people by manual marking/unmarking or using more find tools. Once you get a group you want, you can save it as a set for future use You then generate the report, chart or export, including only marked individuals.

[theKiwi]

Re: Creating a family file when married

Thanks so much for the helpful advice! Just to be clear, if I have one family file with both me and my husband's family members, you say I will be able to easily create charts and reports filtered with just my side of the family or his?

Yes, this is automatic - since if you ask for your ancestors in a report or chart it will start with you and not include any of your husband's ancestors (unless of course they are also your ancestors). Similarly if you start with one of your ancestors and get a descendant report or chart, it won't include any of your husband's ancestors (unless they're also descendants of your ancestor), but it will include any descendants you and your husband jointly have (i.e. children or grandchildren).

Roger

[Barnbarroch]

Re: Creating a family file when married

Without question one file is the right way - suppose your two families turn out to be related somewhere back in history! My mother's and my father's are, many times, though not in last 200 years.
Jamie.

[Janeen]

Re: Creating a family file when married

Thank you so much to everyone for the helpful advice. I'm going to continue adding to my singular family file and try out marking family members for generating reports. Thanks again.