Simple Tree Linking

To link one tree with another you simply set one of the family relationships (father, mother, spouse, child) to link a record in one tree with a record in another. Apart from an option appearing in the other record noting that there are “foreign” records, which they can ignore, their records are not changed. Since you are only changing your own records, you don’t need the permission of the other tree owner to do this, although is it good manners to contact them and ask if they mind.

They may have to give you permission to see private records, as in this example.

Tree linking – an example.

Your daughter has married another genealogist who, like you, has put their family tree into the GDB. At this stage you have no records of your son-in-law’s family, and their tree contains no records of your family. So all you have to do is to link your record of your daughter to his record of himself, and the two trees are linked: -

Step 1. As he is clearly still alive, you would not normally be able to see your son-in-law’s record of himself, so he must give you permission to see it. He does this with Home Page => Manage your GDB Data => [Manage Permissions]. He selects your userid and clicks [Grant Permission] to add your userid to the list of people who can see his private records.

Step 2. Now all you have to do is: -

a. Open your record of your daughter, and click the [Update] button and then the [Family] button. This will display a page like this: -

b. Click [Find Spouse] and search for the relevant record

c. Click this record, and it is linked to the record of your daughter as a spouse. You can now add the details of the wedding as a Marriage Fact: -

d. The result of this is shown below. There is now a single linked tree, with the robertb records (“your records” in this example) in green, and the simonf records” in orange.

There Are Two Ways of Linking Trees

The above example shows one way of the two ways linking trees, in which a marriage relationship links a record from one tree to a record in another tree. The other way is to use the parent-child relationship, in which a child is linked to a parent (or both parents) from another tree. For example, in green’s tree 8 children (5 of them married) are linked to parents:-

Orange finds that these parents are also the parents of one of his records, so he sets the mother and father of this record using [Find Father] and [Find Mother] from the [Update Family] page. This is essentially the same process as [Find Spouse] illustrated above, so has not been shown again. This results in a tree like this, in which Orange’s record (plus spouse) are now linked into Green’s tree:-