Family Historian User Group

i also keep a spreadsheet if I go to a Records Office and scan through for a set of surnames - I keep columns for up to three people (allows for both parents at Christening), have a status for BMD, put in years, any notes and on a separate tab describe the register, where and when I saw it and what ...

You did save it again?

and me (now I've had it pointed out[wink])

When adding citations to an event, I generally find I am creating a new one. It is therefore slow to click on the add citation button then move the mouse to click on NEW on the subsequent form. I think it would be handy to have a second icon which would be Insert New Citation to allow the two events...

I also have a wide range of flags, and I have found that I enter the flag whenever I add a source (I have flags for Free BMD, IGI and Other).

Needless to say it is slow and a simpler way to add flags would help me - e.g. user programmable keys

When I enter a new source, I try to set the Type.

The new source form is a free text box where as the edit source from the source list gives a button to allow a pick list. A drop down list of all established choices would be very handy here (and no doubt other places)

ID:2566

I often spend a spare hour collecting people from the IGI and manually enter them from the christening records. It would help me if I could set all new sources to automatically set a particular repository (the one I use for IGI in this case, though the same applies when I troll through the Free BMD ...

I enter a lot of dates as YYYY (app) when I am fairly sure but not certain (e.g. when a census gives age as 22 approximate). I find typing (app) a nuisance (ok my typing skills are sloppy on the closing parenthesis) and it takes time and I get errors when I key YYYY (app0 by mistake! Would it be pos...

Do you have the option of working the other way round? I.e. keep the master in FH and export to Ancestry occasionally?

Jon - thanks for a great tip on PAF which I looked at once and didn't really explore. I have just spent some time putting in lots of records for ancestors in a small community and have (inevitably) many duplicates where records need tying together. I downloaded PAF yesterday and has made a huge diff...

If the relative is married in a location very different from the previous marriage it is far from impossible that he was committing bigamy!

Just a thought[smile]

The only remotely easy way to do the record locking (et al.) would be to lose the gedcom text file and move the data to a database )(e.g. Access). This would then let a lot of other features be added, but lose the essential benefit of a pure gedcom file. This also won't solve the problem of people w...

Ok - I stopped being lazy and downloaded to read the help file; you have been busy!

Looking forward already[smile]

I won't tell anyone if you tell me what's new - is it just the fix for Vista you mentioned recently[cool]

Have now had a look at http://www.timelinemaker.com. The product seems good but adds another $50 to the shopping list![frown]

Just been looking for all references to timelines. The package mentioned looks good but is another $30. This plus an investment in mapping software starts to make FH a more expensive investment than I originally intended. Then again £7 certificates soon add up! Is there a roadmap for FH anywhere? I....

I have started importing bits of trees from Ancestry (which has its own dangers I know[smile]). In doing so I have run into many problems with data in other GEDCOM files (eg FTM putting things in brackets around dates). To avoid remembering how to programme and writing lots of one off bits of code, ...

In terms of graphics (and slightly off topic, the best open source pacakge is called 'The gimp' and is free. It reads an enormous number of formats, and has a lot of top end functionality along the lines of Photoshop. I use this all the time (though only for very basic image manipulation) and instal...

Don't panic (who said that before?) Entering unrelated individuals is no problem - I entered lot of people in Piddington before I could fully link up all the families. The thing that is 'hard' is knowing what info should link to others in the tree. Finding how to make / break links from the detailed...

I naively started with one folder for all census images and now have loads of them in one spot - nearly useless! I need to think through how to move them all to year based sub-directories (I have named them all starting with a year prefix) and teach FH that they have moved! A project for another day...

I have also had problems with people emailing images that you can't get out of an email. I eventually got them to zip instead of sending the image and the email software passed them through without trying to be clever

ireneb said: I use a freeware program called GEDXLATE which converts a gedcom file to excel format. I use Excel to make lists of queries to take to Record Offices. Irene Irene - thanks for the tip, I just looked this up and it is exactly what I need. I want to do a cross query from an Excel spreads...

I too add a 'phantom' interim parent which I 'genderise' from the surname of the grandchild to decide if the link is son or daughter. I name them XXXX /grandfather surname/.

In most cases I have later merged them with the right child when I have found more references, though it is a bit hit and miss!

Whilst looking for Family Atlas I came across genmap which is still on sale, though no updates since 2002. Has anyone used this latter product?

I ran the report and found the same problem, marked as unreported. The file mentioned just contains mentions to various FH files and the ancestry DJVU image control (as far as I can tell).

FH is running fine.

File contains: