Family Historian User Group

What happens with non-farm dwellers either in rural areas (farm labourers living in a village) or in urban areas? Is there an equivalent "geographical" to "FarmName"? Im not 100% sure of the timing but definitely prior to the mid 1800’s most Norwegians lived on farms and used the patronymic system....

In terms of patronymics (pre surnames) they seem to suggest indexing by Given name followed by patronymics, "Filippo di Michele di Giovanni". They suggest similarly for geographics, "Leonardo da Vinci". So you get all the Leonardo's together, sub-sorted by geographic - which would tend to imply tha...

A relative of mine Olaf Jarlson Bruflot, never had a surname, Jarlson = patronymic name and Bruflot = a farm he lived on. He also had the name Olaf Jarlson Svedal and Olaf Jarlson Naustdal because he lived on those farms as well. Therefore he never had a surname and middle would not work. Also some ...

One is 64. Many of us are 64. It isn't a handicap... Certainly is not! I’m over 64 too and still program, but my interest is less than when I was fresh from university! GEDCOM is still alive at this time, and so long as standard GEDCOM (without too many extension) is produced, some other software w...

Nick Walker said: However, I am also a database designer and the way that GEDCOM/FH is implemented means that lumping (method 2) causes data duplication in circumstances where transcriptions of a source are required and I find myself unable to use a system that requires data duplication. Yes up to t...

Davidf: Maybe my understanding of what you call a meta-collection is incorrect, I’ve never seen the term in our library. This could be nothing more that a “finding aid” an index of information for multiple books, or collections (collected content) that is separate from an individual book or collecti...

although the various providers seem a touch inconsistent in their naming of what a "collection" is. Collection? Dataset? etc. If by this you mean the sort of "meta-collections" that FMP are creating; they are a PITA! I think "Yorkshire Marriages" is a good example - you have to be very careful to c...

I’m writing this from my phone with one finger. Adrian Bruce said: It doesn't have to be - the Title can contain absolutely anything you like when it's not a published, book-like source. It has to be a Description, not a published title. Yes I agree to a point, but when the Source is a “Collection” ...

Tatewise said: The specific location information examples you give omit the most popular sources like BMD Certificates and church records. In the case of church records, for Norwegian churches, these are all contained in books with information for specific individuals on pages and lines just like a ...

In my opinion GEDCOM, be it v5.5.1 or v7, is mostly a “lumping” recording system. The Source_Record contains all of the elements that define a book, website, document and the like, it’s major datapoints are Author, Publisher, Title. The Source_Citation contains the elements that define the exact loc...

In GEDCOM there is not much difference between an EVEN and a FACT. Which are both valid in v5.5.1 GEDCOM, but not in versions prior to this release where only an EVEN existed. What I do see in the example you provided is that the EVEN.SOUR.PAGE tag has a subtag of CONC which is invalid GEDCOM. The r...

tatewise wrote: ↑

09 Sep 2022 14:00

Almost every type of record offers a REFN Custom Id field.
So I think Mark is referring to the Family record Custom Id field, i.e. FAM.REFN as defined in all recent GEDCOM versions.

Got it, thanks. Different terms for the same field.

I don’t see a tag in the GEDCOM v5.5.1 Standard called “Family Custom ID”.

The only tags that could be an “ID” is the REFN and RIN tags.

I use exclusively the REFN tag for my external cataloging system, since it is the only value I can control, while the RIN is solely controlled by the system.

That's my experience, as I originally developed my system for Individual custom IDs way back pre-computer use, and they have transferred seamlessly between several packages over the years. The same can't be said for Family IDs. I originally included them in my Ancestry sync plugin, but they do not ...

Kfunk_ia said: xref_id and RIN have nothing to do with each other. Exactly what I implied, yet RM uses the term RIN to represent the same value in their discussions. And also said: Anyhow, this all goes back to my original assertion that people need to stop using the RIN numbers for anything, they a...

RM is specifically calling them RIN numbers for a purpose because in the overall scheme, that is precisely what they are. What FH decides to do with them is a different issue. The problem here is that by RM calling an xref_id a RIN they confuse the heck out of GEDCOM imports that actually have a RI...

From a GEDCOM v5.5.1 perspective here are a few definitions. XREF (xref_id): The xref_ID is formed by any arbitrary combination of characters from the pointer_char set. The first character must be an alpha or a digit. The xref_ID is not retained in the receiving system, and it may therefore be forme...

This seems to be born out by this very recent discussion on the FamilySearch GEDCOM Github Forum: https://github.com/FamilySearch/GEDCOM/discussions/191 This discussion is the reason why I’m questioning the value of a “Root Individual”, and based on this comment: From my viewpoint, it bases diagram...

Currently, when importing a GEDCOM, many genealogy products assume the first Individual record in the file is the root. What is a “first individual record in the file”. Is this the first physical INDI record? What if someone is importing a subset of another GEDCOM? The first physical record could b...

I have been in contact with GEDCOM since 7.0.1 was issued and contributed to Better GEDCOM in the past! The concept of “root individual” can have multiple meanings! 1) Current report, the individual to start the report from. 2) The individual that started the local genealogy. 3) The first individual...

FHISO seems to have gone very quiet of late. Some of the key people from FHISO are participating in GEDCOM v7. Some genealogy software developers may see a standard GEDCOM as an easy way for their users to migrate to another product so not in their commercial interest. so new, improved GEDCOM has z...

Adrian, I don't understand why you say the GIVN and SURN tags are not mandated by the GEDCOM specification. They are mandated to exactly the same degree as the ones you mentioned. See Page 37 of GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification with examples on Pages 55 & 56. PERSONAL_NAME_PIECES:= n NPFX <NAME_PIECE_PRE...

The standard talks about "Future GEDCOM releases (6.0 or later) will likely apply a very different strategy to resolve this problem, possibly using a sophisticated parser and a name-knowledge database The latest GEDCOM v7.0 still kicks the can down the road. Name recording is hard to wrap a Standar...

When I dug into Ancestry records, the evidence appeared muddled as to whether his surname was Cooke or Bowen Cooke (no hyphen). I even found two signatures from the man himself on applications for membership of the engineering institutes - one said CJ Bowen Cooke and the other CJB Cooke - with only...

How far back in various cultures do we have to go before "surname" becomes problematic? If you are Icelandic you have a problem today, in general they don’t have an inheritable surname since they are on the patronymic naming standard. In Norway it was not a requirement to have an inheritable surnam...