Built into PAF are five different ways of exporting files and one way to import them.  Let's start with exporting.

There are five ways to export a PAF file:

And that, as they say, is that -- we didn't need to say much about exporting.

Importing is an even easier topic.  Here's my one-word advice:  don't!  If you've been following my advice so far, you have an accurate, well-researched PAF database that you can navigate easily and that includes appropriate sources and notes.  My question, then, is why you would want to mess up that situation by copying some stranger's cruft into your file -- unless you're not a genealogist but just a name collector.

"But I just found my third cousin twice removed on the Internet and she is a certified genealogist and she has offered to send me a well-documented file with hundreds of relatives that I haven't had time to research yet."  Oh, well, why didn't you say so?  In that case, here are the tips and tricks you need to know in order to import another file into your PAF database.

First, understand that you have only one family tree.  Properly speaking, it is the historical information that describes the relationships between you and your, um, relations (hmmm, maybe that's why they're called relationships!).  The difficulty is that this historical information isn't all available to us at present, or genealogy wouldn't be much of a hobby.  What we have instead is an ever-growing subset of our family tree, written down on paper or -- in the context of our discussion -- encoded in a computer file.  Just as there are many, many different ways we could write versions of our family tree down on paper, so there are many, many different ways that the information could be encoded for a computer program.  This causes problems because cousin Harriet's genealogy program might not be able to read your data, or vice versa.

GEDCOM

GEDCOM, the Genealogical Data Communications specification, is a file format that lets different genealogical computer programs share data with each other.  Way more than you really want to know can be found by following the links here.  This month, let's forget all about GEDCOM -- how to export a GEDCOM file and why you would want to do so will be the topic of next month's lecture.  Just understand that in the wonderful, magical world of Genelandia, GEDCOM allows genealogists using different programs to exchange their data without losing any information in the transfer process.  Unfortunately, in the real world, some data is always lost and GEDCOM is not a perfect protocol.  But we make do with what we have, and 99% of the time GEDCOM is sufficient unto the day, as the saying goes.

Anyway, I want to quit talking about GEDCOM (more next month, I promise) and talk about importing the data that cousin Harriet sent you as a GEDCOM file.  (If she uses the same version of PAF as you do, then she can just send you a copy of her data file and you can skip a lot of the following discussion.)

And that reminds me of the first step when importing data:  please, please, PLEASE make sure that you have backed up your database before you fiddle with it.  It is way too easy to mess up the file (don't ask me how I know this), and better safe than sorry.  If you are importing a lot, it doesn't hurt to make separate backups throughout the process.  Just ask yourself how much work you are willing to redo -- an hour's worth?  Then back up every hour.

Manual Match/Merge

Now let's get to it.  Here is trick number one, a very important one and not so obvious:  you can open more than one PAF database at a time.  This is kind of intuitive -- after all, Microsoft Word lets you open more than one document at a time -- but because we think of our "one family tree", we forget that PAF can do the same thing.  This, then, is the "best" way to merge a second data file into your database:

1. Back up your PAF database.

2. Open a new PAF database (while keeping yours open).

3. Import the GEDCOM file into the new database.

4. Go to the "Window" menu and select "Tile Horizontally".

5. Carefully navigate through both databases, copying into yours whatever information needs to be in your own database.

"But, but, but -- I don't want to have to retype anything."  Ah, there's the rub.  I didn't say the above was the fastest or easiest, just the best -- best because your brain has to do all the work, so the integrity of your database is safeguarded.  But PAF knows that our brains (and fingers!) sometimes need a break, so there are semi-automated ways to merge two databases together.

"Automatic" Match/Merge

I put the word "automatic" in scare quotes because I want to make sure that you realize that the process is not automatic.  PAF is not smart enough to merge two databases without a lot of input from an alert human.  The more automatic you make this process, the more corrupt your database will become, frustrating the purpose of computerized genealogy (and indeed, of genealogy itself).  You will not have to type a lot, but you will have to think a lot.  Sorry, there's no "magic bullet", but it's still better than the way people did genealogy 30 years ago.  So here's how to do it (you'll notice it's very similar to the steps listed above):

1. Back up your PAF database.

2. Open a new PAF database (while keeping yours open).

3. Import the GEDCOM file into the new database.

4. Go to the "Window" menu and select "Tile Horizontally".

5. Carefully navigate through both databases, deleting from the new one whatever information you don't want to include in yours.

See, no typing!  And I can hear your complaint -- "yeah, and no merging yet, either!"  Patience, Gentle Reader!  There is more to come.

7. Export the new database as a GEDCOM (details next month, it's a cart-before-the-horse problem).

8. Close the new database.

9. Import the new GEDCOM into your database.

10. Do the "automatic" match/merge.

Let's talk in more detail about a couple of the above steps:

Step 9 above:  Why not just import cousin Harriet's GEDCOM in the first place?  Why create a new database from it, then delete a bunch of records, then export it as a new GEDCOM, then import that?  Well, the simple answer is because cousin Harriet is related to a whole bunch of people that you just don't care about.  They are not your relatives, and they should not be cluttering up your PAF database.  It's easier to separate the wheat from the chaff (or the men from the boys) when they are in another database, not the one you have slaved over for years and years.

Step 10 above:  Why do we have to do a merge process?  If we have imported cousin Harriet's GEDCOM into our database, isn't it already in there?  Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is in our database now -- but none of the new records (people) are linked to any of the records (people) already in our database.  Think of your family tree database as a continent, and the newly imported records as offshore islands.  There are no bridges to those islands -- and worse, a more accurate map would show that some of those islands are actually part of the continent, and not separate islands.  This is why merging is necessary.

A completely worked example of the above 10 steps will be demonstrated at the PAF Users Group meeting, and then written up in detail when I have more time.  Watch this space!