Merging repositories and their histories

I have three repositories, A, B and C. I wish to bring them together to only one repository (.), where they are in a directory called ./Archive, so.. ./Archive/{A,B,C}. Then I plan at a later date to move files arbitrarily from ./Archive/{A/B/C}/Something and into ./Something{A/B/C}. (A lame example, but illustrates what I want to do).

I would like ./SomethingA (etc) to have their complete histories from the old repository. I thought I would do this with the subtree mechanism described at http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/howto/using-merge-subtree.html, but I have had little luck getting it to work as I desired.

Firstly, I create a new repository with git init, then I "remote add A", "merge" and "readtree". This immediately leads to two copies of A's files, in ./Archive/A/Files and ./Files. The files in Archive/A do not have any history.

Then if I do this with B, the files do not appear in ./, but again they do not have their history. I have tried using git log --follow -M, but this does not seem to help. I have tried numerous other ways of doing this, but none seem to work.

I thought I would get around my problems doing the merge, then moving the files - this works for A, but when I move on to B, the files are not in ./, so I can't move them. If I read-tree some files, git status/commit shows them as 'new files' and does not seem to recognize them as old files with a long history.

Any help would be appreciated on this problem.

Thanks in advance,

- Peter