Family Historian User Group

What is Gedcom Census?

Gedcom Census is a free utility used by hundreds of Family Historian users since 2004 to conveniently record census entries, quickly adding census events, occupation attributes, birth events and images linked to sources. All of this information is recorded using the Family Historian GEDCOM format and can be included in reports, queries, trees, etc. Gedcom Census has comprehensive help documentation and features to make it easy to use and to accommodate different methods of recording census entries. A review of Gedcom Census in Your Family Tree magazine described it as 'a useful add on that every user should have'. Since January 2004 it has been downloaded over 11,500 times from the FHUG website.

What's new in Version 6?



Better image handling

For those who like to attach images to your sources, you no longer have to link them at the end of the process, it can be done at any time. I recommend that before you start to enter a census record, choose the census year and then select the image (or images) and use the new Gedcom Census Image Viewer to display the image side by side with the main window to allow easy entry of the information. The viewer includes zoom, magnification, 'keep on top', image dragging, remembers the window size, zoom level, etc.

If you use different folders to keep the census images for different years and/or countries, Gedcom Census will remember the locations for each so that, for example, next time you need to select a UK 1851 census image it will look in the correct folder for it.

Recording Births

As well as creating estimated birth events for those with no birth record, Gedcom Census will now add birth date or birth place to existing birth events if this information is missing.

If you are recording a UK 1841 census entry there is now an option to record the birth as a 5 year date range rather than the usual calculated date of birth (assuming individual is 15 years or over and age is divisible by 5)

Other new features

• 1911 UK census entries can now be made
• Census country can be quickly changed on the main screen without the need to go into the options screen.
• Added another reference code to the Title Template option for method 1: {KEYPERSON} will fill in the name of the first person selected for the census. This may lead to some users no longer needing to use the 'Other Info' field.
• In the narrative description of an individual that is displayed at the bottom of the main screen, Gedcom Census will now estimate the age of the individual for before, after, between, from and to dates as well as the standard dates previously dealt with.
• There is now an option to limit the number of backups of files kept by Gedcom Census to an amount chosen by the user
• The user now has the choice to select all the individuals first and then enter their ages. Previously it was not possible to select an individual until the previously chosen individual had their age entered.
• There is now an option to cancel the loading of large GEDCOM file.
• Gedcom Census no longer defaults to saving log files and backups to the Gedcom Census installation folder (e.g. C:Program FilesGedcom Census). Unless a different location is specified within the options, the log and backup are saved to a folder in the user documents (My Documents) called 'Gedcom Census Backups and Log'. This should help to ensure that Gedcom Census always works with standard (non admin) user accounts and avoids the virtual store being used in Vista.
• It is now possible to miss out the space after the comma when typing the name of an individual into the 'Find Individual' screen
• If changes have been manually made to the 'Full Text' field when using recording method 1, then the user is now warned if these edits will be lost due to a field change following the rules of the full text template.
• Gedcom Census will now remember whether you previously had 'Show All' ticked and retain this setting between sessions.
• There are also various changes to the interface throughout the program

Bug fixes since previous version

• When using auto-text, Gedcom Census would assume that the head of household was married even if there were no marriage events for the individual in question. This has now been fixed.
• If changes were made to the file outside of Gedcom Census then any birth details entered before the reload were lost and had to be re-entered. This has now been fixed so that these birth details are retained
• Gedcom Census didn't handle people with names that had text after the surname, e.g. Mary /Smith/ Bloggs . This is now fixed
• Fixed a problem where flag check would cause a crash if a census event had a blank date

Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who has made a voluntary donation via the link in Gedcom Census which certainly helps to encourage me to keep going with this project.

I'm also very grateful to everyone who made suggestions for this version, reported errors and helped with testing including Jon Axtell, Gerry McAllister, Jan Murphy, Paul Eveleigh, Tony Jones, Tom Curd, Richard Sellens, Jen Stocker, Maggie, Adrian Cook, Chris Michael (apologies if I've missed anyone).

Finally as always a big thank you to Jane for supporting Gedcom Census and hosting the download.

If you do spot any problems please can you email via Nick @ Gedcomcensus.com

Please use the Gedcom Census forum if you have questions.
This program has been replaced by Ancestral Sources

Nick Walker
Gedcom Census Developer

And a big thank you to Nick for listening to all our suggestions and problems and continuing to develop this wonderful program.

Many, many thanks for your continuing development of this excellent program - couldn't do it without you!

Mark

Thanks again mark. I cannot wait to use it.

Ron