Family Historian User Group

Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 11:53:33 +0100
Brian Teece wrote
I've been trying to transfer source and census information across from > Pedigree but FH rejects the coding, a sample of which is given below. I'd be > grateful if you could explain where the errors are and what needs to be done > to make it acceptable to FH. > I appreciate that the census data is using cusom tags - will FH accept these > if they are changed in some way, or is there another way around the problem? > > Kind regards, > Brian Teece > > 0 @I2547@ INDI > 1 BIRT > 2 SOUR @11@ > 0 @11@ SOUR > 1 NOTE Parish Register & IGI > > 0 @I5551@ INDI > 1 CENS @295@ > 0 @295@ CENS > 1 CNUM 300 > 1 CYEA 1881 > 1 CADD Cobridge Rd,Shelton,Hanley > 1 CPER TEECE Harriet Head W 67 Broseley > 1814 > 2 CONT TEECE Benjamin Son U 47 Stone Miner Broseley > 1834 > 2 CONT TEECE George H. GSon 16 App.in Pottery Hanley > 1865
Brian, the census stuff that Pedigree is not valid GEDCOM. The line '0 @295@ CENS' defines a record of type 'CENS'. There is no such record in GEDCOM (not in GEDCOM 5.5 at any rate, which has been the standard for about 7 years now). Nor does GEDCOM contain any provision for defining your own record types. If you want to try to recover this information, the best thing would be to try to find someone with a later version of Pedigree that does a better job of exporting the data. Failing that, you could try editing the GEDCOM file directly and converting all your Census records into Note records. If you want to do this, as always, please make sure that you *backup* all files involved before you try any of this out, and check the results very carefully before starting to make use of a file that you've edited in this way! (and, again, this is all at your own risk if you do it).
To edit the GEDCOM file to convert CENS records to NOTE records, you would first have to find all occurrences of lines that look like
0 @295@ CENS
and change them to
0 @295@ NOTE
The number between the @ chars must remain unchanged, in each case. This is a little tricky. You could search for all occurrences of '@ CENS' and replace this with '@ NOTE', but you would need to check that '@ CENS' never occurred in a different type of context. Alternatively, if you want to, Microsoft Word and other editors allow you to use 'Wildcards' (sometimes also called regular expressions), which would make it possible to do the search and replace in a single pass (not easy unless you're already familiar with using Wildcards), specifying something effectively like this: Find me a line beginning with '0 @' followed by any text, followed by '@ CENS'; and then keep it all the same but replace the final CENS with NOTE (In Word 97, open the Replace dialog, click 'Wild cards', set Find What to '(^l0 @[0-9]@@) CENS' without the quotes and set Replace to '1 NOTE', without the quotes. Experiment with this yourself, to make sure it does what it should, before you rely on it!).
Having done that you would then want to find all occurrences of lines containing '1 CENS @295@' (or something other record number other than 295) and replace them with lines containing '1 NOTE @295@'. Again, you could do this by searching for 1 CENS @' and replacing it with '1 NOTE @' as long as you were sure that the search text did not occur in the wrong context anywhere.
That should take you forward a bit, but you would find that your new Note records contained no text, and had lots of 'star-burst' fields (unrecognised fields that F.H. has loaded and treats as text, but doesn't actually know what the fields are supposed to be used for) in them with the Census info. CNUM, CYEA, CADD and CPER and for example, are not valid GEDCOM. You could use this data to manually edit the census records over time, to move the data into the text portion of the note. Alternatively, when you do the conversion, you could if you wanted to try changing this at that point. e.g. when you edited the GEDCOM file you could change
0 @295@ CENS 1 CNUM 300 1 CYEA 1881
to
0 @295 NOTE Census - 300 - 1881
or something similar. You could experiment with a sample file, perhaps, and see what works best in practice.
Good luck.
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer

As a long time user of originally Pedigree and more recently PediTree; and a new user of FH I have encountered the problems described and have been fairly sucessful in overcoming them with techniques similar to those recommended.

Some additional comments:

To the best of my knowledge there is no later version of PediTree which will handle higher GEDCOMs. Perhaps of interest is that I (for my own reasons) work with the earlier version of PediTree which only handles GEDCOM 4. Despite this I did not find it too much of a hastle to modify the GEDCOM export into a form that FH could accept.

The search and replace procedures described can be handled efficiently using a WP such as Word or Edit Pad Pro, using the global command 'Replace All'.

I did not experience any problem with the search and replace causing things to be ignored or stored in the wrong place.
Though it was a little bit of a challenge to find out where FH put the information. Using the All Tab in the Property Dialogue and expanding each event to show all attributes helped.

Since I have some 30,000 records to bring over it was important to find a fast and effective way of doing this. Editing each record separately is just not practical

Hope this helps, Don

Possible a related difficulty, is that I have found that Marriage notes which in PEDIGREE are an attribute of Marriage are imported into FH as is, but that Marriage notes input via the FH Main Tab are not an attribute of Marriage if you look in the All section. The notes are in different parts of the 'tree'. I wonder why this is? Should I edit the GEDCOM before import? I dont want Marriage notes in two different fields. The section of the GED file from FH looks like this:
0 @F5@ FAM
1 MARR
2 DATE 2 JUL 1949
2 PLAC Ealing Green Congregational Church
2 NOTE Groom lived on Kew Green, Bride at 18 Cairn Av, off Ealing Green Road
1 HUSB @I1@
1 WIFE @I10@
1 CHIL @I12@
1 CHIL @I11@
1 NOTE Marriage Notes test
1 CHAN
2 DATE 24 MAY 2008
3 TIME 23:12:40

The Marriage note uses the key '2 Note...' whereas the Marriage note test generated by FH used the key '1 NOTE...' I will change '2..' into '1..' and re-import to see what happens. Hopefuly the Marriage notes will be imported into the correct FH Marriage field.
Tim Haymes (new user)

This simple change was painless. I can now see my Marriage notes in 'Notes Tab'
I will now change all the other Marriage notes in the same way. Regards
Tim