Family Historian User Group

@Adrian If you want to use current administrative areas, then the legal position of the unitary authority areas in England is that they are non-metropolitan counties , although -- go figure -- their councils are non-metropolitan district councils (i.e. the unitary authority is a county comprising a ...

AdrianBruce wrote: Yes - I found out earlier today that two bits of what is now Canada, were once, a long time ago and far away, part of a version of Massachusetts. :? Go back to the very early days and the earliest colonial grants and charters were 'sea-to-sea'. Theoretically, Massachusetts, Virgi...

AdrianBruce wrote: Mmm - I'm not sure. I'm trying to work with "East London, Cape Colony" at the moment, as there was no such administrative concept as "South Africa" at that time, it looks suitably different, and I've no idea if "South Africa" meant anything at the time other than a fairly general...

@ Mike But then there is no jurisdiction called England. For the purposes of law there is "England and Wales", which is of course a remnant of the old Kingdom of England (which included Wales) because the English and Scottish legal systems have never been unified. With regard to administration/juris...

Thanks for the pointer - I did quickly peruse the archive, but there's too much to read it all in full, so it's good to have someone with a long and active presence on the forum who can recall when such things have cropped up before. As to the whole of the UK vs E/I/S/W thing, the honest truth is I ...

Having moved over from FTM to FH, I am now in the process of a big data clean up and I am trying to bring some consistency into how I handle place names. I have many ancestors from Gloucester, which until 1974 was a county corporate (i.e. the city was a county in and of itself and administered separ...

You could just buy an extenal DVD drive and plug it in to your laptop when you need it. You can get one (new) for as little as £5–£10 these days.

I have a couple in my tree who were married, had children and then divorced. The couple were subsequently reunited and lived together as an unmarried couple, until ultimately one of them died. How best to record this in FH so that the relationships appear correctly in reports? If I correctly set the...

Bug re. private individuals/events appearing in reports reported to Calico Pie and slated for a fix. Their reply to my email:

Thank you for reporting that. We will be bringing out a minor update soon and will fix this issue in that.

Family Historian Support

Some interesting thoughts. Thank you, people. When I need a full academic reference, I have something along the lines of General Register Office (GRO), Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth: 22 Dec 1867 Robert Collier (Southport: GRO, 2009), citing King's Norton 6c (Q1 1868) 453. Most times though, as...

You make a valid point. For all practical purposes, I think I agree with you, i.e. it is pretty much surplus to requirements. Depending on the audience though, sometimes you want/need watertight references. Equating the author with the original copyright holder could be a good gauge most of the time...

When setting up sources for GRO registers, it seems pretty clear the publisher is the General Register Office in London (or Southport, depending on the date of publication). What about the author though? Is there an argument to be made that the author is the Registrar General, on whose authority the...

No expert myself here, but one thought occurs. It sounds as if, when you put FH on your new laptop, you just copied and pasted the the files across from your other machine? That will not work -- you have to actually install the software. The installation process makes various necessary changes to yo...

Is it best to report a requirement for including/excluding witness role facts directly to Calico Pie, whatever their email is, or just post into the wishlist thread on this forum?

I'm new to FH and so far I'm very impressed, although there's a bit of a learning curve! There are a couple of issues I can't find an answer to in the forum or elsewhere - can anyone point me in the right direction? Firstly, where I have created my various GRO birth certificates as separate sources,...

Thanks, Mike.

Is there anywhere we can control the arrangement of the text in the individual source footnotes, i.e. the order in which the elements appear and the punctuation between them, or is that hard wired?

Is there any way to format text appearing in footnotes? I prefer to follow MHRA style where I can, which calls for titles to be italicised. For example, for a reference to a GRO death certificate held by me I would want to see: General Register Office, Certified Copy of an Entry of Death: 18 March 1...