Tuesday, May 16, 2006 - Tue, 16 May 2006

In the Problem Reports section of the Behold Forum, Max said he needed to reconstruct separate GEDCOM parts back together. Specifically, familysearch.org only allows you to download single family groups or up to a 5 generation pedigree as a GEDCOM. To get a whole family, you have to do multiple downloads and then somehow put it all together: a lot of work!

I had never thought of this need before. It is something that at the basic level, should be relatively easy to add into Behold. Familysearch uses consistent ID numbers to represent people, so there is no guessing whether you are talking about the same person. But at the more advanced level, it gets into all the complexities of merging and comparing. If all the data is the same, it will work okay. If the data can be added together (additional data) that is okay. But if there is conflicting information and links that don’t match, then it gets trickier.

I am going to try to get some basic functionality for this in before the Beta. I’ll have to do it as simply as possible at this point, and can enhance it later on. This could make Behold a great tool for those who need to reconstitute files and I don’t think there are any other programs that can do this. It leads to other wild possibilities as well: Could Behold eventually make the requests from Familysearch for you and automatically download the GEDCOMs and build the full tree? We’ll have to see. :-)