Family Historian User Group

I don't know where this topic belongs so am happy if it is moved.

A couple of months ago, shortly after starting with FH, I mentioned the fact that I used Dollarhide Id numbering in my file and Mike Tate suggested that a plugin should be possible to set the numbers.

http://www.fhug.org.uk/forum/viewtopic. ... 992#p51992

Last week I felt able to start on such a plugin and it has been an interesting experience both in terms of discovering stuff about plugins and some deficiencies of Dollarhide numbering. I was expecting the plugin to number everyone in the relationship pool of the root and it did that on my test files. However, when I tested it on a copy of my main archive file some individuals in the pool were not numbered. It wasn't hard to see which ones and from that to work out why.

The plugin revealed a fact about (my version of) Dollarhide numbering which my manual prefixing system had glossed over. The numbering fails when an individual has two (or more) sets of parents (birth and adopted for example). As far as I can find out there is no assignment of Id numbers to both parents which allows progress up both trees in this case.

Thus, for example, my wife is adopted and I have trees for her adopted family and her birth family (and this is one of the places I use separate prefixes). As far as I can tell only one of these trees can be directly and fully numbered in the Dollarhide system.

I am currently working on a further modification to my Dollarhide plugin to account for this but I would be interested to know if anyone reading this knows the correct recommended numbering in this situation.

David

Hello David, it is me again.
I have found some interesting Google pages that you may like to ponder:
(1) Terry Cole's Genealogy Research & Tips > Numbering Tutorial
(2) Ancestry > Message Board > Ahnentafel Numbering

In (1) under Complications > Trees within trees he talks about going back up a subsidiary tree.
Any person can be treated as a new tree root and the standard ancestry numbers added to their current number after a "/".

So if a direct ancestor were adopted then there adoptive family would have their Dollarhide Number as a prefix.
e.g. Your father is 2.0 and his birth parents are 4.0 and 5.0, so his adoptive parents would be 2.0/2.0 and 2.0/3.0

I presume you use this for the ancestors of spouses.
e.g. You are 1.0 so your wife is 1.0* and her birth parents are 1.0*/2.0 and 1.0*/3.0

You question is how to designate your wife's adoptive parents.
Well under Multiple Starting Persons he allows a capital letter prefix on alternative trees.
So perhaps the adoptive family tree needs such a prefix.
e.g. Your wife is 1.0* and her birth parents are 1.0*/2.0 and 1.0*/3.0, so her adoptive parents could be 1.0*/A2.0 and 1.0*/A3.0 and so on

In (2) the last entry by NCJECulver looks a very interesting variant.
Its use of letters to identify family groups allows parent/child relationships to be more clearly defined, especially in complex families.
(There seems to some confusion over whether "/" or ":" is used to switch to a new tree.)
In this scheme your wife is 1a and usually her father is 1a:2 and mother 1a:3
This scheme could also represent her adoptive parents as 1a:A2 and 1a:A3 and so on

Mike

Many thanks for the two references. I have read Terry Cole on Dollarhide numbering but do not recall reading something quite as clear as that tutorial. The forum thread on ancestry is also very interesting. I think he is mixing his use of : and / and neither of them can be used in a Windows filename. I use @ for this purpose so that the individual whose Id lies to the left of the @ is the root of the tree and the numbering to the right is the Dollarhide id relative to that root. For the same reason, Windows filenames, I use # for spouse.

Your comment about adoptive families is one I had not considered. They are in effect in-laws when it comes to family trees and since I have a way to deal with in-laws perhaps that is a direction to pursue. The plugin I have written constructs a table of spouses who are not otherwise related and then numbers trees for them after the main tree is numbered. It should not be too hard to do a similar thing for adoptive (or any other form of) second parents

At least one of the points made by NCJECulver is something I have worried about. Namely, the numbering of siblings across families. I thought I had a simple solution (not implemented in my custom Id numbering) and that is that only the children of the ancestral family are numbered that way. So 6.3 would indicate the 3rd child of 12 and 13. Children who only share one of the ancestral parents would be numbered differently so, 12.01 (and the 0 is important) would indicate a child of 12 but not of 13 and ditto 13.01. But, ultimately there will be a failure when an ancestor has three or more wives (I have just one of those, as yet). Also, and important to me, I have thousands of files on my computer which are ordered (thanks to Windows Explorer) by the existing numbering and it does have the advantage that all children (and their descendants) come in a group beginning with the same number.

At this time all of my manual numbering is done with a prefix (two initials) to denote which particular branch of the family they belong to. I am maintaining 4 branches in my file and these branches do collide from time to time and so for the VIPs who belong to all 4 branches I record four custom id's with an = sign separating them. This rigmarole makes it easy for me to separate off part of the file when I am asked for information about one particular branch.

So in this system I am DN1.0=JW1.0#=JP1.0#=LB4.0. The two middle numbers here represent my wife's trees. This is fine by hand, and I have the major advantage that apart from a small number of (living) key people the branches were able to be chosen so that they do not overlap. But I have not been able to reproduce this numbering using a plugin. At this point I have a somewhat messy plugin which works on files without the complication of individuals with more than one set of parents but perhaps there is a way forward.

To be honest I think of this as about learning Lua and the data structure of FH and I will probably not use this plugin, but who knows.

Many thanks Mike for suggesting it.

David

Hi
Sorry if I've gone back in time for this post but I'm thinking of using something like the Dollarhide Numbering system for Custom ID's in my tree and apart from Terry Cole's old site there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of information about.
I saw that David was writing a plugin for his own use back in 2014 and just wondered if this came to anything, and if so could I blag a copy .
It might not be exactly what I want, but as I've never written a plugin myself I'd probably find it quicker to manually enter the details than start from scratch.

Thanks

Michael