Family Historian User Group

Is it being fooled by a copy of the page in local cache? It sees that so doesn’t realise the internet is not available. An alternative approach might be to ping an external IP address.

Indeed - the laptop happened to still be set to IE, as I have to use that to interact with IP cameras in the stables via ActiveX controls - the manufacturers have been notoriously slow in migrating to alternative technology, and that's the only browser that still works! Jane was speculating that the...

If you have just disappeared from charts and diagrams, have you changed privacy settings recently, for example to send a printout to a third party or upload to website? I had a similar problem recently when a couple of “sensitive” records disappeared from Family Group Sheets.

I seem to be getting slightly different results when running FH on my laptop with the wi-fi disabled: <Plugin Store...> from the plugins menu opens Internet Explorer, but I get a browser error saying that I am not connected to the internet. FH continues normally with the Plugins window still open an...

The link posted by Ann makes for some more interesting calculations. Using their model of 2.5 breeding children per family, the average person today will have nearly three quarters of a million 5th - 8th cousins . If we multiply the individual groups by the claimed Ancestry detection rate for that g...

Ancestry themselves say the change has been postponed until the end of August as a result of user feedback. The stated reason for the change, as Ann pointed out in the first posting, is to "improve the likelihood you’re actually related to very distant matches." That got me thinking about the number...

Another trick I have used in the past to represent a date as a single integer is year + month x 16 + day x 32. That makes it readily accessible to bit-masking routines to extract individual fields. Time started in 1900 because Excel and its various clones are designed as business software, and way b...

Memories of my old day job - a precision mismatch between spec limit and measurement, and that’s before we’ve even considered sampling error (DNA differences between full siblings) and measurement error (repeat test on fresh sample from same person)...

Pedigree was my first family history software. I can’t remember exactly when, but it was a DOS program supplied on a floppy disk that I ran under Windows 3.1, so around the early 1990s. PediTree is its Windows successor, from the same programmer (Pedigree Software/Murray Kennedy). I’ve long thrown o...

Definitely sounds like something is wrong somewhere. My relatively small 1000-person core database loads in 5 seconds on a 9-year-old computer! Fast start up was one of the attractions of FH for me, coming to it from Family Tree Maker, where slow starting and long processing times were routine. How ...

Dave - the message box plugs directly into the Windows interface, so unfortunately its behaviour is determined by your Windows configuration. One option is to delve into the Sounds settings within Windows to kill off the annoying beeps altogether (which won't affect media playback etc.) (Windows - S...

Welcome to Family Historian! Two options, both from the main focus screen (which is probably easier for a beginner to use than working with diagrams/charts). Select the husband by clicking on their name box (which will change colour to show that it is selected), and then either select <Add><Spouse.....

I have a similar case in Fulham from exactly this period, but for me it’s the other way around. Unusually, the father’s full details were included on the child’s birth certificate, along with that of his unmarried mother who lived in the next street. The father went on to marry somebody else only th...

I’d be inclined to wait until V7 appears and give that a thorough test. Hopefully CP at least skim-read this forum to pick up programming issues, so I will assume they are familiar with the general issues. If they have made improvements, it would be good idea to invite Linux/Mac users to be beta tes...

Mervyn, I'm sure you are correct in thinking it is the NovaPDF install that is hanging, rather than the core FH one. I was able to kill the frozen installation screen by ending the "novaink7.exe" process in the Fedora System Monitor (very similar to and presumably modelled on Window's Task Manager)....

The release notes for FH 6.2.6 (i.e. the latest substantive revision) do at least recognise that there is more to do for Wine/Crossover compatibility, so hopefully V7 will take us further in that direction..... A couple of other hopefully relevant observations: I tried the installation on Fedora 32/...

PS - to test my current setup (Mint), I tried installing the free demo version of RootsMagic under Wine. It installed fine, with only a couple of minor warning messages, and appears to run my basic database copy ok (but very superficial testing only).

Mervyn, You are certainly right about Wine variability! This was a good time to experiment, so I repeated the exercise with Ubuntu 18.04. This installs Wine 3 by default, and I went with this rather than jumping through hoops to force Wine 5. Wine 3 set to either Win 7 or Win 10 behaved similarly to...

Colin, it wasn’t well phrased, but I think it was highly relevant. I don’t know whether an installation that hangs if the instructions are followed or completes with a screenful of error messages if they are modified is successful or not. It’s probably a moot point, as I suspect that only an advance...

Apologies folks, that was not the clearest post I have ever written, as I included a misleading screen grab and unnecessarily discussed a known issue with an easy workaround. It was actually posted in the recent thread on updating the knowledge base https://www.fhug.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t...

I have an old basic system (AMD A6/4 GB RAM, 250 GB SATA disk) dedicated to Ubuntu, as there are some things that are either easier in Linux or even not possible in Windows, and I learnt many years ago that dual-booting is riddled with problems. I have just done a clean install of Ubuntu 20.04, so i...

Fully agree with these comments. My Ancestry tree is public, as I want people to see the details and contact me if they are interested. However, it is "bare bones" only (BMD etc and census only, no sources or media), and stops two generations back from the present time as I mark everybody more recen...

And that is the key general point - it is not sufficient to just support a format or character set. When copying data between applications as text files, both applications have to be set to use the same character set (and date format, to avoid m/d/y - d/m/y - y/m/d corruptions), otherwise data loss ...

I didn’t say they don’t support it. I said they may not by default. That is based on my early experience with importing a GEDCOM file into Excel and processing it with VBA. All the £ signs disappeared from my probate entries! I didn’t pursue exactly where the incompatibility was (the text import or ...

Another potential trap when moving data between applications is around character sets. This is particularly relevant when using characters that are specific to individual languages. Family Historian uses UTF-16 by default, which is very good at handling international characters, but many office-base...