Family Historian User Group

FreeBMD mimics Ancestry Not strictly true - the earlier indexes on Ancestry are FreeBMD. That is why they are free to search. My experience of the GRO’s own on-line indexes is that while they contain useful additional information, I have multiple examples of entries missing altogether from the GRO ...

Not just hand-written registers - some of the image files used for transcribing were of rather dubious quality, leading to errors and inconsistencies. However, it depends on what your end objective is. Do you want everything researched to "proper" standards designed to stand up to legal challenge, o...

FTM is perfectly happy lumping certificates and index entries together under these generic headings (i.e. where you have a certificate, it is just a citation with a lot more detail), but in FH it is probably best to split out certificates as individual sources in their own right. This is analogous t...

Paul - There was a project to digitise all the GRO records that was outsourced to Siemens in 2005 and planned to take 3 years. However, by 2008 only births up until 1934 and deaths up until 1957 had been completed (no marriages at all). The project was then abandoned as part of the financial crash s...

Interesting- that strongly suggests most hobby users are heeding advice to defer, but one consequence of that public-spirited action is that those who don’t get a very good service... The GRO are probably caught between a rock and a hard place - if they are readily coping with the current reduced de...

Up to a point - most downloaded images are still subject to copyright, either from the original producer or the site they were downloaded from, so uploading elsewhere is likely to be a breach of copyright.

Anything you downloaded while you had a subscription is yours to keep forever of course, but my understanding for both Ancestry and FMP is that if you simply link to the source image (so there is no copy on your local PC), you lose access to it if you stop paying the sub. That’s one of the reasons t...

There are products that have much tighter integration with on-line search sites. For example, RootsMagic and Family Tree Maker both synchronise with Ancestry reasonably well. However, the producers of Family Historian have not chosen to go down that route. That can be mildly inconvenient if you also...

OK, makes sense. FMP photographed the documents and had exclusive use for quite a while until Ancestry also published them. This strongly suggests that Ancestry simply used FMP's citations, rather than confirming them independently. A useful reminder for all of us - I certainly don't check the front...

Who's the head of household in the second case, to make it easier to find? Missing or incomplete citations are not unknown, so in these cases you have to go back to the original images rather than rely on the transcribers to enter the details correctly.

Unlike earlier censuses, the PRO/NA reference is not printed on each page. However, the Schedule Number is included, and if you scroll back through the images you should see the piece number (RG14/xxxxx) recorded at the start of the individual book (the archives “piece”). That is all I record in my ...

DNA is a science and you need to understand how it works. That is an admirable aim, but one of the issues we have is that it is extremely complicated science, and a field that is still evolving (if you'll pardon the accidental pun). Even the basic building blocks are degree level biochemistry to un...

Mike (L) - the Schedule Number for UK censuses and the 1939 Register is specific to the household, not the individual. I also include the Schedule Number in the source Publication Information (but not the media file name) as it is both a useful prompt for where to find the entry on the page, and in ...

I think it is exactly like Quantum Theory - it is both false and positive at the same time, and we can’t know until we look at it, and by then the cat is probably dead anyway...

Similar to mine - for two separate households on the same page, I create two separate sources, but both link to the same image file.

Trevor, There’s quite a difference between the 3% that analysis of the numbers suggests and this claim of 50%, so it’s worth looking into in a bit more detail. I must admit, I’m a little wary of the links you posted. They are not peer-reviewed science, but a blog by somebody who has no formal traini...

Fair point - the OP doesn't say whether he has already taken an autosomal DNA test (e.g. Ancestry DNA). A strong link there to other descendants of his presumed g-grandfather (or earlier) would also provide evidence of a link, but the further you go back in time, the higher the chance of the link be...

I have a system for one of my databases where the individual reference number is determined by their relationship to the home person (i.e. me). Master is S01. Their father is R01 and mother is R02 Father’s parents are Q01/Q02, and mother’s parents Q03/Q04 In general, An’s father is always (A-1)(2n-1...

Paul, Y-DNA is specific to the male line. You imply you are talking about your paternal grandfather (common surname), but that needs to be the case. If (and it is of course a very big if) another living male line descendant of your biological g-grandfather has also taken a Y-DNA test with the same c...

Before I gave up with FTM I spend HOURS editing my sources so that I had a list that made sense but it doesn't look as if all the information has transferred over. I suspect your information has come across, but FH doesn't do a very good job of displaying the individual citations of a "lumped" sour...

In my case, I'm completely confident they are independent trees for all practical purposes (London, Midlands, East Anglia verses Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and West Country) but I agree that if there is any prospect of a combined tree being needed in the future, now is probably the time to d...

Welcome to Family Historian! I made the transition from FTM 2012 to FH about 2½ years ago, and had more or less what you have now - two trees of a few hundred individuals each, both linked to Ancestry via their automatic synchronisation. I still keep them separate, as they are history trees for myse...

Actually, I think it’s very relevant. You said yourself that the general purpose add-in is complex and difficult to maintain, but I’m reassuring the newbie who wants something much more specific for their own use that it can be achieved with something much simpler and easier to maintain. Both types ...

Users who relish an IT challenge and also find that they need to run the same export repeatedly (say to update an on-line tree somewhere) could always take the plunge and have a go at writing their own dedicated plug-in, tailored to exactly their needs. I looked at the existing excellent plug-ins fo...

But please bear in mind that the GRO requests that non-essential requests be deferred due to Covid 19 staffing restrictions. Hobby users should hold off for the moment, so they can concentrate on folk who genuinely need a certificate now.

My pending shopping basket is growing all the time...