Hello All–
I am working on a surname descendant tree from an original ancestor (b. 1630s). I presently have a RM9 ‘from scratch’ tree of about 3000 names. I want to compare this file with another RM file I’ve created from downloaded FamilySearch results in order to see what lines I might be missing, or where the data differs.
The downloaded FS chart has more than 35,000 individuals, and I want to drastically cull the resulting file to bring it more in line with my original ‘from scratch’ RootsMagic tree. I am running into difficulty trying to create an automated way to remove the huge number of extraneous lines of descent from the downloaded file. Can anyone help?
Here’s what I’d ideally like to end up with:
Since I am following the surname down through the male line, I obviously want to include all the males, but I also want to include any of their daughters/sisters who were also born with the same surname, and their (male) spouses (although not the children of these couples, who are born with their fathers’ surnames). In my experiments with marking individuals to set up a deletion list, I cannot find a way to combine the given options with Boolean queries to get the results I’m seeking. If I select for just the y-line, the result eliminates all women, which is not useful; while limiting to the surname alone discards the spouses of the women who were born with the surname.
A further complication, perhaps not solvable, is that I would like to keep the names of non-blood related spouses who have married other people, either before or after their marriage to the surname holder. These would be marriages between two people, where neither of them is related by blood to the family I am following, so I can foresee that this would not be possible–but I would be grateful if there is a way to do it.
I hope that’s not too confusing–Thank you for any help you can provide!