Family Historian User Group

Agree - FTM, RootsMagic and FH are all excellent programs, with their own strengths and weaknesses and enthusiastic user groups, but it is the combination of GEDCOM data transparency and plugin flexibility that makes FH my current favourite. But equally, arguing which is the “best” is about as usefu...

I occasionally have to re-enter my password in OneDrive or Outlook, but it never asks me to change it. Do you have two factor authentication enabled (where you provide additional authorisation via a phone app for example)? If you don’t, you probably should, as it is more secure.

Thanks Mike, that certainly appeared to me to be the case so good to have it confirmed. My plugin now automatically generates a sorted list of non-living/private individuals who have been changed (or are the spouse in a changed family) since my last RootsMagic GEDCOM import. In combination with the ...

I think I am there now, but one minor point to check please. My final output is a list of individuals that have been updated since the reference date, sorted alphabetically by surname then given names. The only way I can find to do this is to have two hidden columns, for surname and all given names,...

Thanks Mike. I’m using this very much as a learning exercise, so I’ll take a step back and make sure I fully understand what is happening.

So far, so good. I can get my reference date/time stamp from the OS, the Updated values from both Individuals and the first Family where they are a spouse, and interconvert between OS dates & times and FH dates & times, but I'm struggling to generalise my code so it checks all families for an indivi...

While it's worth knowing for future reference what is causing the upload problem, I make no apologies for repeating a question I have asked before on these forums. Why would you want to upload sources to Ancestry anyway? You have ticked the box that says you "grant Ancestry a sublicensable, worldwid...

Fair point, but knowing whether the problem occurs with just one individual or multiple individuals would be a step forward. If multiple individuals, what do they have in common?

If you go down this trial and error route, a good technique is to first load half your records, then the other half. If one group works and the other doesn’t, you know which half has the problem record. Divide this half into two and repeat. Each iteration reduces the possibilities by 50%, and is muc...

Thanks Mike. My existing query misses individuals where the changes are only recorded at the family level (e.g. replacing approximate marriage details from a GRO index with precise details from a Parish Register or Certificate), so the logic will be to list individuals updated since the reference da...

This is spun off from a recent thread on exporting data from FH to Ancestry to exploit hints, but I’ll ask it here as it is of more general relevance. At the moment I use a simple query to generate a sorted list of individual records changed since a reference date, with the date defined as a paramet...

PS - an alternative solution may be to sync via FTM, but the current version is far too expensive just for this one facility, and I don't know how well its merge and sync functions work. Older versions of FTM synced with Ancestry very well (they should do, as Ancestry owned it at the time!) but that...

Yes - it is what I use, but there are a number of issues with it: 1. The database comparison in RootsMagic 7 is known to be flawed, so doesn't reliably identify all records that have been modified in the new version (or rather, it identifies too many changes, and identical records with limited data ...

It's not related to your export problem, but one issue I found with repeated exports for Ancestry hints was that each export seemed to be treated as a new tree, so all the previously reviewed hints come back. Have you found a way to make Ancestry remember what you have reviewed already? It's managea...

When using the public plug-in, it is very noticeable that the run time increases significantly once FH has been open for a while, from near instantaneous to perhaps a 2-3 second lag before the result is presented. Presumably FH is doing a less than perfect job in managing its use of resources, and e...

After a bit of reading and trial and error, I've reduced the public plug-in to the following code for the special case of cloning a source, which is all I use it for. It seems to work ok, even on sources with multiple attached media records. tblT = fhGetCurrentRecordSel('SOUR') if #tblT ~= 1 then re...

Thanks Mike - most of my current coding is done in Python (Linux/Raspberry Pi, as well as a powerful tool for direct manipulation of GEDCOM files), and that uses indentation rather than end statements or curly braces to denote distinct code blocks. The definition looked distinctly odd in Python term...

Thanks Helen - easy when you know how Even three years into FH, I'm still finding new features, and have now worked out that you can also set your preferences to lock all query windows automatically. I think I'll leave that set, as I frequently use query outputs for more extended operations.

A new set of parish registers that are very relevant to my research have been uploaded to Ancestry recently. To help me work through the relevant records in my project, I have constructed a simple query to list those that are more likely to be relevant (e.g. births in that parish without a baptism c...

Don't forget the option to display timeline facts as well. It won't help you choose the correct entry, but it will give you the ages of individuals at the time of other related events, such as children births.

Thanks both - I thought that was the case, but the Sample Project is not fully consistent in its use of the two span alternatives, as many residences are recorded as "between and" rather than "from to".

Quick question - is it possible to display quarter dates in the Facts tab please? In the attached screen grab from the Sample Project, the marriage date is entered as a quarter date, but only the year is displayed. If I enter a broader range involving months, it is truncated to years only (eg bet Ap...

It probably depends on how many records there are and how your mind works as to which is the better method. The GEDCOM route is potentially quicker, but you will be picking names to delete off a list (unless there is a query that lists only the records to be deleted) and may have to do some recovery...

I removed a small branch of about a dozen people recently. I couldn’t restore a backup as they were not a recent addition to the tree. However, I simply deleted the individuals one at a time, then deleted sources with no citations, and finally media records with no citations.

Purely out of curiosity, I paid the £29 to LivingDNA to analyse my Ancestry DNA according to their more granular UK regional breakdown. The results came back within a couple of hours and were very much a mixed bag. The detailed numbers were way off what the paper trail would indicate (over 50% assig...