Subject: [FHU] GEDCOMS
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 09:28:32 +0100
Andrew Hough in an email on 4/6/02 says that Family Historian has converted tags in the following format
1 OCCU Clerk 2 DATE Jan 1917 2 PLAC 48 Gozzard Street, Bilston
into something like this
1 EVEN Clerk 2 TYPE Occupation 2 DATE January 1917 2 PLAC 48 Gozzard Street
which it then complained about in an error report.
He says:
>> Somehow, an occupation becomes an event and the source reference is changed. I presume the quality and date tags have been transferred from the source data. Having mangled the original, the program now rejects the changes it itself has made.
>> Why change the OCCU tag. The one provided is perfectly good.
...
>> I must admit that after this second example, I walked away and left it so I haven't confirmed the problem with other test data.
Andrew - I think you have made a mistake. Family Historian doesn't convert tags in any circumstances. I can only assume that the file you looked at which had the 'OCCU' tag was not in fact the file that you loaded into Family Historian and that it produced the error report for. You have somewhere along the line muddled 2 files. If I'm wrong about this, I shall certainly apologise, but I can't see any other explanation.
David Meredith's response email (5/6/02), in which he says how to edit your file to prevent it generating errors, was quite correct. If you look at the quoted Family Historian error log, it contains this line:
l.46 - Skipped invalid line : '1 EVEN Clerk'
which tells you which is the invalid line was:
1 EVEN Clerk
That is not valid GEDCOM. The spec is quite clear about this. You are not allowed to put anything after EVEN. Family Historian tries to be as tolerant as possible of invalid GEDCOM. It can cope up to a point with a completely invalid tag. Where it struggles sometimes is where you have a valid tag (which EVEN is), which is used in an invalid way (putting a description after it). It can cope with some invalid uses of valid tags (e.g. invalid date formats), but not all. The problem with the EVEN tag is that Family Historian has nowhere very good to put the data after the tag,and doesn't know what it is anyway. Having rejected a line as invalid, Family Historian will then always reject any qualifying tags for the invalid line. Each line skipped for a qualifying tag will be listed with the text 'skipped branch line'. So when you see an error report, you should mainly ignore those and look for the lines where it says 'Skipped invalid line'.
Of course, this is not to say that Family Historian cannot do better in the future at identifying invalid things that other programs do, and produce ad hoc solutions to cope with them. But that would involve looking at the header of a GEDCOM file to find out which program produced it, and then doing different things depending on which program it was. It doesn't do anything like that right now.
What is a bit mysterious is that David Meredith says that the kind of use of the EVEN tag shown above is something that Family Origins v10 does, if you include a description, and I've seen this too (in the files I've seen, the qualifying TYPE has been 'Misc', but that may be irrelevant as it isn't in D.M.'s example), but John Hanson doesn't get this kind of GEDCOM generated when he uses any version of Family Origins, including version 10. Did you include anything in the Description Field that D.M. talks about though, John? Looking again at your email, I can't see any description for the event.
Simon Orde List Administrator and Family Historian designer