Family Historian User Group

Hi Forum

I want to privatize Cause of Death data when exporting to GEDCOM for use on Ancestry etc. I made a test and enclosed one Individuals Cause of Death data by double square brackets as follows: [[ Died ]]

I then used the Export function and made sure the Exclude Private Notes is ticked.

I went on to create the GEDCOM and uploaded the file in Ancestry only to find that Cause of Death was still present only this time enclosed by [[ ]].

Am I doing something wrong or is the Cause of Death field not covered by the Exclude processing logic and why not?

BR

David

What "Export" did you use - I use the Plugin "Export Gedcom File" and that has an "Exclude [[Private]] Note" option which worked fine for me.

The [[ ]] notation only applies to 'Notes' and Cause of Death isn't a 'Note'.

From the FH help file:

If a field does not allow multiple lines of text to be entered into it, it does not support private notes.

The [[ ]] notation only applies to 'Notes' and Cause of Death isn't a 'Note'.

Why not? I suspect it's a limitation of the GEDcom format but don't know for sure.

Your workaround would be to include the cause of death in a Note rather than use the standard field -- or use the standard field for a sanitised version of the cause of death and include the details you don't want to publish in a note.

I had the [[ ]] in an Address field to hide the Town on the record (eg "Mayday Hospital, [[Croydon]]") and the Plugin removed the [[Croydon]] so before changing data I would suggest trying the Plugin.

Hi
I'm on that now - thanks for the tip.

David

That worked a treat - Thank you very much.

BR

David

Just to fill in a few gaps:-

I don't believe the [[ private brackets ]] convention is anything to do with the GEDCOM specification.
It is purely an FH invention that is restricted to multi-line long-text fields such as Note, Address, Text From Source.

However, the Export Gedcom File Plugin extends the convention to all text fields.
But remember that in FH its displays, Reports & Diagrams will retain the [[ private brackets ]] in short text fields such as Cause.

When using the Export Gedcom File Plugin, I hope you chose the (ANC) Ancestry Family Tree option that customises the exported GEDCOM specifically for Ancestry in order to retain as much of your data as possible.

Thank you Mike

Always handy to have the full story. Yes I noticed the different upload strategies and found the ANC one.

But noticed there is no MyHeritage in the list, should I just use std 5.5 or other?

David

Nobody has asked about MyHeritage before, and I do not have a subscription, so cannot investigate its GEDCOM dialect.
There is nothing in their Help that says anything about the versions of GEDCOM that are acceptable.

Try either the Standard GEDCOM 5.5 or Draft 5.5.1 and let me know how you get on.
You will probably have to select (WIPE~ALL) Remove Multimedia.
Make a note of what character encodings work (ANSI, UTF8, UTF16) and what Project data appears to go missing.

I can then start experimenting with some (MHT) MyHeritage Tree custom settings.

Thanks Mike

I'll come back to you after some testing.

BR

David

See Export Gedcom File for MyHeritage (14617).