Family Historian User Group

It is well known and respected that Family Historian uses only bona fide facts etc which conform to the GEDCOM Standard (unlike other programs Family Treemaker etc).
The Facts as set up by FH are all to Standard I believe, but in most peoples research there are a number of facts that are missing that I feel are necessary viz:-
Hobbies
Electoral Roll
Medical (not the one that is set up as Military)
Workhouse Roll
I have set up as Custom :- Hobbies, Medical (non military), and Electoral Roll
These are "slung out" as unknown facts by FT Analyzer.
Is it possible to set these up as Standard not Custom or can they be added to Wish List
Any comments welcome
Thanks

I suspect that the ones that FTA are objecting to, have been set up as Custom Attributes.

To check this, go to Tools/Work With Facts Sets... and see what Type your custom facts are. If they are Attributes, then I suspect that explains it.

It's not at all obvious but Custom Events and Custom Attributes get written to FH's GEDCOM file in radically different manners. Custom Events follow a pattern that the GEDCOM standard actually documents so FTA should not object to. Custom Attributes are not permitted under GEDCOM 5.5, so Simon extends GEDCOM (as is permissible) to accommodate them. If I'm right, then FTA is objecting to those.

This is, however, just a suggestion on my part....

Firstly, there is no way to turn a Custom Fact into a Standard Fact.
As you say FH adheres to the Standard GEDCOM Spec that defines the Standard Facts.
The GEDCOM Spec allows for certain Customisations and FH adheres to all these rules too.

The snag with Customisations is that not all software programs understand all the possible Customisations.

FTA certainly just ignores any Custom Attributes and does NOT even report them as Unknown Fact Types.

FTA does report Custom Events and they can be all listed in detail on the Data Errors tab, just click Clear All and then tick Unknown Fact Type.
Strangely, some of these Unknown Facts still appear in the Individuals/Families Facts, but not all!

Thanks to both of you. I understood somewhere sometime past that there was a possibility of the GEDCOM standard being updated ??

Yes, there was a Draft Revision from LDS, and other organisations are proposing alternative standards, but none have been ratified and adopted by the genealogy community in general.

In any case, it still would NOT let you convert Custom Facts into Standard Facts, although there may be more Standard Facts in the spec.

It's true that we can't do anything about the list of standard facts as defined by GEDCOM. But we do allow people to define their own sets of custom facts (called fact sets) and to share them with others by uploading them to this website - see

http://www.fhug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id ... s:factsets

Over time the hope was and is, that some fact sets might become widely used and hence become effectively de facto standards.

Thank you Simon & Mike.
It just seemed a little "strange" that facts data as :-
Electoral Rolls
Workhouses
Hobbies
etc
had not been provided as Standard within 5.5 ??
I do see that a custom Electoral Roll can be down loaded from the site but where does it end ??
Thanks again to all of you
Still a very good program which I wholeheartedly promote through my U3A group.

Don't forget that the 5.5 standard is about 14 years old, maybe even older. The 5.5.1 standard AFAIK is still only a draft and that is dated 2 October 1999!!

You have to bear in mind the authors of the GEDCOM standard were/are the Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) whose objectives were probably slightly different from those of modern genealogists.

This explains why there are special LDS related entries that are rarely used by most current users.

I suspect Hobbies would not figure in the LDS thinking.
Since it originates from the USA and is looking back past the modern era, peculiarities of relatively modern British life such as Workhouses and Electoral Rolls would have been unknown to the authors of the standard.

P.S.
Simon Orde's point is valid but applies to the FH community and not any other genealogy software.

Thanks again to all of you for your comments. I will live with this situation anyway !