Continuing on....and on...and on....

I have been plowing ahead with my insane attempt to finish the merge mess I created when I downloaded and attempted to merge in my Ancestry.com tree to my Legacy Family Tree desktop program, and then transfer the entire file over to TMG so I can make my data available via my website with Second Site. 

If you are considering importing your Ancestry.com tree into your Legacy file so that your source records that you have linked will appear in your Legacy file, I have some advice for you.  Don't do it! Instead, manually enter the sources from Ancestry.com into your Legacy file.  At least then, instead of tedious, non-researching merge time, you can actually be researching while doing this.

It is going well I guess.  But it has been mind-numbing and tedious. Very mind-numbing and tedious!

It is all my own fault. I realize this, I really do.  Had I entered the full birth dates, Legacy would have auto-merged much more of the duplicates.  Had I stuck to one location standard, Legacy auto-merge would have auto-merged even more.  I'm not even seeing an Auto-merge option at TMG.  This frightens me, because it means that if I finally cave and split my file into 6 pieces to import to TMG  I would have to manually merge!!! all the duplicates from the overlaps. I say six pieces because so far I have had success with importing 150,000 people at a time to TMG, my total file contains currently 885, 496 individuals (with 1, 375, 291 source citations if you care.)   I can probably make it a few thousand smaller if I ferret out all the merges that didn't get done.

What I need to do now is go literally person by person through my entire file and improve what I know on each person.  Ideally, I would do this once I get the data over to TMG, but that is taking too long. The best plan I have thought of so far is to divide up the database into parts, a New England part, a New Netherlands part, a French Canadian/Acadian part, a nobility/royalty part.  That is only 4 sections though, and not necessarily even sized sections.  Then take note of the number of individuals, import the 4 parts to TMG, and merge until I have the same number of individuals.

Another option is I continue to use Legacy, and publish the data to the web in sections like I described above.  The downside to this option is there would be no "recently updated" option, and I would have to manually fix all the ID #s in Second Site each time I regenerated the webpages.  Despite this, this is probably what I will do for now, until I figure out a better plan!

I have a strong desire to actually research today! So, I am going to research all the people born this day today.  While doing that I will hopefully improve the locations and find some more merges to do....