Family Historian User Group

Colin -- I have lost track of the number of times I have done a search on Google to discover the answer to some question -- and discovered one of my posts from a couple of years ago where I had answered it for someone else! Isn't that what writing is for? I keep telling people to keep a genealogy jo...

Thanks to the link to the Firefox support article. I've been having persistent problems with my video driver. I've turned off the option for Firefox to use the acceleration -- it will be interesting to see if this makes Firefox crash less often.

One of the things I like to do when using printed sources such as the probate calendar, electoral rolls, directories, and other things like that, is to check the front pages of the book for information on how the book is arranged. For some eras, there is a statement at the very front of the volume s...

One advantage of subscribing to the -L version of the list instead of the Digest is that it's easier to jettison any spam messages that might make it through the list. Since the recent problems with Rootsweb, I've pretty much given up on subscribing to Digests. It was annoying enough dealing with pe...

My Eureka! moment of the weekend, from Ancestry's database UK, British Army and Navy Birth, Marriage and Death Records, 1730-1960 , specifically Royal Artillery Records of Service and Papers from WO 69/554: I discovered that TNA's Discovery has the names of people in the records as part of their cat...

At the risk of further complicating things -- Re: filtering for gender -- Women might appear in electoral rolls in England because they qualify to vote in local elections, and their entries might persist after the death of their spouse. Someone who is collecting all of the entries for a family might...

I have remote access to MyHeritage Library Edition via one of my genealogical society memberships. Sometimes when you use the sites of the big data providers at an institution, you aren't getting the same service that you can get via a personal subscription. The major advantage of having a MyHeritag...

Just another vote for using the Named Lists for this task. Note that FH already has Named Lists "Bookmarks", "Key Individuals", and "Work in Progress". The advantage of having a Named List of "Work in Progress" versus an auto-save is that you can keep track of where you left off on each individual l...

James Tanner reports at his blog Genealogy's Star that MyHeritage posted a notice about NewspaperArchive content at MyHeritage: http://genealogysstar.blogspot.com/2016/06/myheritagecom-makes-newspaperarchivecom.html NewspaperARCHIVE.com Collection Notice We wanted to give our users a heads up that M...

From the latest Lost Cousins newsletter: http://lostcousins.com/newsletters2/latemay16news.htm from 9am (London time) on Monday 23rd May, until 11.59pm on Monday 30th May you can access any records that appear in hints completely free. More info at FindMyPast . I haven't tested this yet to see if th...

Here is my standard advice for anyone asking if it's worthwhile to subscribe to an online data provider: do as much as you can to learn how to use the website before you subscribe. Many sites have how-to articles or videos that show you how the site works, or free email newsletters, or other resourc...

Just wanted to add a note to people who are unfamiliar with Legacy Family Tree Webinars. For most webinars, the initial broadcast is free to the public. The recording is usually posted the same day, or the day after, and is free to the public for the next 7 days. After that, it is available by subsc...

I made a copy of one of my GEDCOMs and created a new project so I could experiment with the Find My Past hints. I viewed the hints for one of my people and then accepted them because they were records I had already examined and as far as I know, they belong to that person. Then I found myself in the...

Customer Notice Update 1 April 2016 Friday, 1 Apr 2016 Our ScotlandsPeople search rooms will reopen from 9.00 am on Monday 4 April. We apologise for any inconvenience the closure may have caused and thank you for your patience. Please call 0131 314 4300 for any seat booking enquiries. http://www.nr...

There are also obvious rejections like those hints for events that have taken place after a death where you have the death certificate and it would be a great time saver to be able to clear the "unwanted" hints out of the way without having to go to the details page. Getting search results or hints...

While I am still seeing the message on the RootsWeb main page about the expected recovery date of 16 March, some functionality is back.

In particular -- the most important part is back.

I received messages on both FHU-L and Devon-L this morning.

This message went up a few days ago: We're currently experiencing a temporary website outage due to Rootsweb hardware failure. Rest assured, our development and web operations teams are busy working to securely restore the site as quickly as possible. Our initial expectation is to have the site back...

Here's what Ancestry has to say about the matter: http://help.ancestry.com/app/answers/detail-announcement/a_id/9284 Rootsweb is experiencing some temporary site problems. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. Our development and web operations teams are working on the problem and we ...

I watched a webinar today from one of the British research specialists at the Family History Library, on England Civil Registration. I was 99% sure I would know most of the information in the presentation already, but sometimes it's useful to get a refresher, and as an ex-teaching assistant, I like ...

Just for completeness: One of the identified issues on import, is that FH "Changed some valid EVEN tags to the custom _ATTR tag because they contained line details, which wasn’t allowed under GEDCOM 5.5 but is under 5.5.1". As we know from another thread, Individual Events should not have line deta...

I see you have swallowed the Apple iPhone, iPad, iTunes, etc, marketing publicity. Apple are very good at it, and charge you a fortune as well. Android can generally do all those things too, but cheaper. Not me. I use iTunes on my Windows computer, have an Android smartphone, and use TiVos which ar...

... without all the excess baggage of family trees, forums, and social networking. Except that my view - and I suspect Ancestry's as well - is that the "average punter" would look down their nose at a site without all that "modern" stuff. Judging by the (in my personal view) more-hysterical respons...

I wanted to drop in for reference the link to Keith Riggle's series on GenealogyTools.com: Replacing Family Tree Maker, Part 1: How to Scrub Your Data He's doing a series on converting FTM data to other programs and plans to have a post on Family Historian. It will be interesting to see what he has ...

I just hope that now Ancestry is "venture capitalised" it at least retains its empathy towards genealogists. Is the discontinuence of FTM a start, or should they never have started the post FTM16 version in the first place, but that is another story. In my opinion, Ancestry's new business model is ...

Hi, Bill --

I found out about Paul Nixon's blog because of a webinar he did -- if I recall correctly, it was offered as one of the "Find My Past Firsts" perks.

Glad the information helped!