Excluding living people from a GEDCOM Export

[elizalor]

I'd like to upload a tree to FindMyPast, but want to exclude living people. I am trying different things using Marked Sets, also tried duplicating my Family File, but it is very tedious to work through. Anyone know of any automatic way to create/export a GEDCOM that excludes them? (I know FindMyPast says I can set privacy settings so other users can't see my tree, but my preference would be to select for myself what I upload.) Thanks for any hints/ideas.

[Bruce Christopher]

I'd like to upload a tree to FindMyPast, but want to exclude living people. I am trying different things using Marked Sets, also tried duplicating my Family File, but it is very tedious to work through. Anyone know of any automatic way to create/export a GEDCOM that excludes them?

Unfortunately it is not a simple process. I don't know what procedures you have already attempted but here is my recommendation.

What you need to do is make sure you have established appropriate preferences that let Reunion know who is to be considered "Living." This is called "Privacy filtering." Since a person without a death date is in an unknown state of being, Reunion can be told what birth-year to use as a basis for classifying people as private (i.e., presumed living). Then when you create a report, chart or export to GEDCOM, you can specify "Use privacy filtering" and although those people considered Living will appear in the output, their identity will be redacted. What you're asking for is to take this one step further to actually omit those persons entirely from the GEDCOM file.

Open your Preferences window (Reunion>Preferences or command-,) and select the Privacy and Sensitivity section. Here you can set your criteria for establishing who is private in your tree. So for example, for "People with no death date born after:" you might set it to 1919; for "People with this flag checked:" you probably want to select "Privacy." That 2nd option allows you to manually flag individuals to be private regardless of their date of death. Then you need to check your settings in the "What to do with private people" area. I usually set "Name:" to "Omit" and "Additional text:" to "(Private)". Just below that, it will automatically display a Sample of how a private person would appear in a report, chart or GEDCOM that specifies Privacy filtering. You also have the option to include certain details about the person and/or a picture, but in my opinion those options defeat the purpose of Privacy, so I would say leave those boxes unchecked.

Note that if you have persons with no birth or death date, it is best to enter an approximate birth date using the "abt" or "ca" qualifier, and then indicate in the memo field that this is just a rough estimate. Reunion will then have something on which to base its determination of "Living."

Next you will need to use the Find command to find all persons whose "Attibute>Living" is "Yes" OR "Flags>Privacy checked" is "Yes." With the results of that Find appearing in the Results Sidebar, click on the green checkmark at the bottom and select "Mark Everybody in family file"; then click it again and select "Unmark Everybody in List." Now everybody who is not living and doesn't have the Privacy flag set, will be marked. Then in the Export you will specify "Marked people and their children" to be exported.

When performing the Export, you may also want to specify "Exclude sensitive data" if you have made use of any of the "Sensitivity" preferences (which is the 2nd half of the Privacy and Sensitivity preferences panel). Also review the "Optional fields" that the Export process allows you to uncheck; you may have fields you don't want to appear online for anyone in your tree.

And finally, I recommend that you create a new empty familyfile and import your GEDCOM into that to confirm the appropriate people and fields have been excluded.