When getting started with family history and Family Historian some users have difficulty in deciding whether they should have one or many projects. For myself I much prefer to have a single projectA Project is a Windows folder, created by Family Historian, which contains all your Family Tree information recorded in Family Historian. Normally located in the Documents\Family Historian Projects folder. with all the information in, so that’s all the branches of my family, my husband’s family, my brother-in-law’s family etc.
The advantages with this is that I can do a diagram or a tree or a report for any member of my family, so if I do some reports for my nephew’s that will include all their relations and you don’t need to worry about joining trees together or having the same information in multiple files.
Of course it’s possible that you’ve got some completely unrelated trees perhaps you’re doing a research project for your friend and her family don’t overlap with yours in anyway, in that case it’s sensible to have a separate project for that, as it’s easy to then give the project to your friend for her to using her own copy of the program.
If you do build a very big project when you come to share the information with other people you might need to use the export option. You can extract out just the people that relate to a single person, so you can export all relatives of my first cousin once removed and it won’t include all my husband’s family and my brother-in-law’s family it will just include the relatives that are related to him by blood and their spouses.
The tools in family historian which you’ll need to look at are the already mentioned “export” perhaps the “split tree helper” to remove additional information.
What you would normally do after using the export option is to then use that new exported gedcomGEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. It is a file format that most genealogical programs and online trees recognise. file to create a Project. This will copy over any linked mediaWhen you add a picture, video, sound recording, document file etc into a Family Historian project, a Media record is created to represent that media item within the project; the Media record includes a link to the actual Media file. to go with the new gedcom file and you can then simply send a full backup of the new Project to your contact, just remember to remove any sensitive information about living people, there are Tools on the family historian for stripping down that information include the helper already mentioned and several pluginsPlugins are small programs that allow new features to be added without upgrading Family Historian itself; some plugins are written by Calico Pie and others are written by users. in the plugin storePublished plugins can be downloaded from the Family Historian Plugin Store. to do with cleaning up living information on a project or gedcom.
For a few more opinions check out Structuring your project.
[Reproduced with permission from Jane Taubman]