Family Historian User Group

I have an old basic system (AMD A6/4 GB RAM, 250 GB SATA disk) dedicated to Ubuntu, as there are some things that are either easier in Linux or even not possible in Windows, and I learnt many years ago that dual-booting is riddled with problems. I have just done a clean install of Ubuntu 20.04, so i...

Fully agree with these comments. My Ancestry tree is public, as I want people to see the details and contact me if they are interested. However, it is "bare bones" only (BMD etc and census only, no sources or media), and stops two generations back from the present time as I mark everybody more recen...

And that is the key general point - it is not sufficient to just support a format or character set. When copying data between applications as text files, both applications have to be set to use the same character set (and date format, to avoid m/d/y - d/m/y - y/m/d corruptions), otherwise data loss ...

I didn’t say they don’t support it. I said they may not by default. That is based on my early experience with importing a GEDCOM file into Excel and processing it with VBA. All the £ signs disappeared from my probate entries! I didn’t pursue exactly where the incompatibility was (the text import or ...

Another potential trap when moving data between applications is around character sets. This is particularly relevant when using characters that are specific to individual languages. Family Historian uses UTF-16 by default, which is very good at handling international characters, but many office-base...

Indeed it has, but I was clarifying that the same process is appropriate for a relatively minor change to name. It may be "obvious" to regular contributors here that identity of place is based on the full name in whatever detail is entered, but not everybody will necessarily pick up that point. I'm ...

Nobody has mentioned it specifically in this discussion, but presumably using the “standardized” place name is the recommended method to deal with the issue we have all come across where county names in particular change over time? For example, Middlesex/Surrey/Kent vs London, Lancashire vs Merseysi...

I don’t mind a subscription when there is an ongoing service, such as OneDrive and Microsoft 365, but I agree it’s a poor option otherwise. I would also be very wary of tailoring my family history records to one particular piece of software. Both FH and RootsMagic seem to be driven by individuals (S...

I suspect it arises from subtle differences in how the original image file is encoded. For example, all my 1939 Register images are jpeg , as are all 1911 census and probate up to 1972. However, later probate entries (1973 on), which were made available on-line more recently, are all jpg ! Parish Re...

From time to time, I do a review of my database to check for consistent names and formats, missing references, etc. In the list of media records, images are recorded as both jpg and jpeg format, even though all the original files are of type *.jpg . My first thought was that editing the files to rem...

My two pennies’ worth - Separate trees for self and wife, as we grew up hundreds of miles apart and there is absolutely no overlap. I can combine them later if either of our children want to extend it in the future. I include only the following: 1. Direct ancestors 2. Siblings of direct ancestors 3....

Curious - I think you might have misread the linked page, Mike (or equally I might have misunderstood your question ;) ). If I run the code snippet in Linux, it behaves exactly as described, with the illustrated table including the default permissions for a newly created test directory (full rwx for...

Mike - this looks like it might be relevant (not checked it myself)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/164 ... ble-in-lua

We’ve all come across examples of boosting a lowly occupation description, but I think the one I found this morning is my favourite so far - a lifetime of being a painter’s labourer was described on his son’s Marriage Certificate as a “Pastel Servant”! I wonder if the Registrar managed to keep a str...

I find the free details (full name, date and place of burial) useful for confirming burial details, particularly if you already have at least an approximate death date from other sources (GRO index/certificate, probate etc). Subscribing will give you the original cemetery register, which will usuall...

Dave - probate gives married surname, which identifies marriage and husband name, so we have already identified the "private" record. It's then easy to find their daughter, her marriage, and two daughters born in the mid-1960s, none of whom are on the tree. You could do the same with my public Ances...

Sources reveal more unintended data - the source for Jane Smith's death, burial or probate will probably give her married name, hence another potential easy lead into finding children.... This has actually given me food for thought on my own public tree - I will delete all references to first cousin...

Bear in mind that does not fully protect living people. You might be private, but if full details of deceased parents are provided, it’s fairly easy to identify their children from public records, particularly if the tree says how many there are and their gender. I would now have a name, age, rough ...

Personally, I'd rather keep my detailed research and information about living and other private people off Ancestry completely. I use a dedicated Python script that extracts bare bones information from my tree (just who, when, and where of key details such as birth, baptism, marriage, death, burial,...

Agree, for that purpose it is fine. However, if you want to exploit Ancestry hints you have to do by compare and update, otherwise each refresh resets your record of viewed hints and starts again. A typical 1000 person tree can easily generate 5-10,000 hints over time!

It is for me when I’m looking for the launch file in the Documents app, but I search more slowly than a web server...

Indeed, but it is a lot easier finding start.html among a handful of files in the DVD structure compared with navigating to index.html in the web version when there could be thousands of files in the same directory! I suspect Calico Pie opted for the flat structure to avoid issues around how directo...

Excellent, thank you for the steer. It works perfectly. I was also able to create a website and select the index homepage, but that is less convenient as FH seems to insist on dumping all the website files into a single directory rather than having a separate data directory as it does for the DVD op...

Another comment - it never ceases to surprise me how many people upload copyrighted material as Ancestry images, particularly pictures of GRO certificates, census returns, and other such documents. Ancestry seem to turn a blind eye to it (cynically, more traffic to their site, more chance of new sub...

If you re-export to RootsMagic, the Ancestry sync will regard it as a new tree. To keep continuity in Ancestry, you have to maintain the same RootsMagic database and update it from your new export by comparing the two databases and individually updating changed records. It’s clunky, but it does work...