[Phpgedview-talk] Linking my son's four grandparents' GEDCOMs

[David S. <da...@da...>]

I'm trying to set up a site for our family history, and have been trying to make some simple division among the four ancestral families (my parents' familes and my wife's parents' families).  Essentially, I've got something like this:

* Alice Doe and Bob Jones, with son:
** Charlie Jones
* Danny Smith and Ellen Miller, with daughter:
** Fran Smith

Charlie and Fran then have a son, George.

To put that into Ahnentafel notation, we'd have:
1. George Jones
2. Charlie Jones
3. Fran Smith
4. Bob Jones
5. Alice Doe
6. Danny Smith
7. Ellen Miller

(I hope I got that right).  Okay, now that I've got that established, here's what I've been trying to build:

* A GEDCOM for each of the Doe, Jones, Smith, and Miller families
* Each GEDCOM includes Charlie and Fran, and their son George
* Each entry for Charlie and Fran, in all four GEDCOMs, includes links to the other GEDCOM files to connect their parents back (for example, in the Jones GEDCOM, Charlie has a link to his mother in the Doe GEDCOM, and Fran has a link to her father in Smith, and to her mother in Miller, etc.)


The problem?  This doesn't seem to work.  Sometimes, for example, I'll be in the Jones GEDCOM file, and if I look at George's pedigree I won't see everything from all the files.  And even Bob Jones' entry in the pedigree isn't the one from the local (Jones) GEDCOM, but instead is displaying one from (say) the Doe GEDCOM, so you can't even see his parents anyway.

I could go into more specific details about the problems I'm seeing, but I'm not sure that's 100% relevant. 

I have to believe that others have tried to do this before.  I really want to split up the GEDCOMs, either so I can have different front-end URLs for each family, or so that at the very least one can log in with a preferred GEDCOM and then only see the events pertinent to that family (so it's not clogged up with anniversaries for the other families).  Really, the only people who'd want to see all four families' events would be, in this example, Fran, Charlie, and George.

I haven't actually completed this on my site (I only have three families input and most of that is only skeletal) but there's enough that I'm seeing problems.  It's also possible that I've got some older links from earlier experiments (like maybe George being the linchpin, linking to parents in each of the four GEDCOMs), but I can't remember.  I'm close to simply ginning up simple GEDCOMs and testing from scratch.

Any suggestions?  Should I not include the current generation (George) in any of the GEDCOMs, and just put him (and his future siblings) into their own file?  If I did that, would he be visible to viewers in the other GEDCOMs, or does the linking only work backwards (linking in ancestors but not descendants)?


Thanks for any suggestions you can give me!

david.