Spreadsheet TO Gedcom TO Geni

Well, Don, it seems you should be able to make the columns in your spreadsheet match what Excel2Ged needs.
You can add columns to your spreadsheet and change the order of columns without doing any programming. For example, to move a column, select it, copy it and then paste it somewhere else. Then go back and delete the original column.

You can see a screenshot of what Excel2Ged needs at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/excel2ged/

What are the columns that your spreadsheet has?

Thanks James, I have figured out how to combine cells by downloading a plugin, so that has helped a LOT!

I am also playing with "SmartGenealogy V3.0" which can import Excel and export Gedcom, so it may be a more user friendly solution..

The issue I am having is that my list is 99% unrelated individuals, and Geni only imports one person from the Gedcom.....so I am contemplating giving them a fake relationship to trick the importer and then delete the relationships later....Its that or import them 1 by 1......

Well, Don, it seems very strange to me that you are importing unrelated individuals. That doesn't sound like a family tree to me. I think you would do better just to import the people where you have relationships. You could do that by importing a small GEDCOM file for each cluster.

After you import each one, look over the small unconnected tree that you have just added, and see if a blue "flag" pops up, to suggest that one of the people you added is in the Whole World Tree already. If the other relatives match, you could request a merge between the person you just added and the profile that was there already. This happened for me when I added my g-grandmother, Adelaide Sturt Henderson (Morphett) (Adelaide Sturt Henderson)
There she was in a branch of Morphett relatives. Those profiles matched the people my mother had told me about, so I requested a merge, and her manager agreed. I now have access to all those Morphetts, and they have access to all the Hendersons I have added.

Remember, Geni is for cooperating together on our research. I hope you will find that cooperation helpful in your work.

If you want to store information about unrelated people, why put them into family tree software. Why not just use the Contacts in your email program?

For the unrelated individuals, you may do better searching for them in Geni than just adding them.

Jim
PS. I have just noticed you are a Curator already, and here I am trying to tell you how Geni works! :-(

Jim, yes I am a curator, but thanks anyway,,

FYI: I can see importing unrelated individuals as a really reasonable need: for example, one could take the records (e.g. voter registrations) of all of the persons in a (small!) town and import all the "family groups" in that town at once. Then, by looking at marriage records over time, start to inter-connect them. And build their branches outward with census information.

Complicated, but quite feasible & reasonable.

Thanks Dan!!

My list is of murder victims, they all have families who eventually (hopefully) will find the profile of their loved one and build onto the profile.

Jim - In reading your most recent post above - you mentioned your list is of "murder victims." It might be an excellent addition if you took each profile and added them to the appropriate "Cause of Death Project."

So you ( Varjatud kasutaja) want to import a list of people what are not related, but are connected to each other that they have a common death cause. (murdered)

As you are a curator I understand why you want to do it.

Maybe it is a good idea to contact the Geni staff how to do this.
I think you know very good what the limitations are of the GEDCOM importer.

I would like to be able to import data for unconnected profiles in Geni as well
We have a lot of open source data in the Netherlands that could be useful. I tried converting some to GEDCOM format and that is possible. But importing those is not practical because you will have to create a separate starting profile for each import if the profiles are not connected.
May be someone who is a programmer could do something with the Geni API to facilitate that kind of imports.

re: GEDCOM to import unrelated profiles

hmmm ... does GEDCOM import require a relationship to other profiles within an import?

A couple of thoughts to experiment with (maybe someone has tried):

a) create an initial Geni profile to start with of one of the GEDCOM profiles, but don't specify other relationships ... do they come in disconnected?

b) create a 'fake' parent; import against child. Then disconnect each child from the fake parent (and delete that fake parent profile). While perhaps tedious by hand, the disconnects ought to be a relatively simple API procedure for all of the children of that 'fake' parent.

Dan,

Yes the import does require relationships and ASSO does not help to get the profiles imported. I think that is something that should be changed.

I could try with a fake parent as a work-around if there was a program to do the disconnects, but I think it would be better when there was an importer for unrelated records.

I have done the experiment with a "Unknown" as the parent, and imported 100 "siblings" that way... but disconnecting all the profiles and adding the profiles individually to the project is tedious.... A Chinese curator has a script for adding profiles to projects apparently.. Anyone know who?

Varjatud kasutaja may be who you are thinking of. I know he has a script that 'walks' a branch and can take actions on each profile. I also recall (vaguely) he worked on a script to add to a project.

The person who you should talk to about using the API to add profiles is Volodya Mozhenkov.

Thanks, Dan. I have worked a bit with a biographical database (but didn't quite get around to finish the job), and add the profiles to this project: https://www.geni.com/projects/China-Biographical-Database-CBDB/46406

I have also helped our Finnish curator with this project https://www.geni.com/projects/Moving-from-K%25C3%25A4kisalmi-Provin... based off of an excel spreadsheet, I believe.

If it looks like what you need, you may send your spreadsheet to me.

I just saw https://www.gedtool.de/index.php/en/ (haven't tried it out yet), but it may be useful for those who have data in Excel

Thanks Job, that looks interesting, I will do some experimenting...