Family Historian User Group

All :-
I have been working on my family history for quite some years. With respect to census entries I used to use them as sources for age, occupation, residence, relationships etc with the date of those facts being that when the census was taken. However, I did not record the census as an ‘event’ only a source.

In more recent times I’ve been using ancestral sources, which adds the event for me.

Some sites I’ve uploaded my gedcom to have flagged up as a suggestion that the census event is missing / I should add census details, which is an irritant
.
Is there any way of ‘programmatically’ going through my gedcom file and where facts have been added on the date of a census a census event is added, rather than me doing it by hand which will be very laborious. Alternatively is this me being silly / suffering from OCD and I really shouldn’t worry about it?

Thanks
Kevin

I don't suppose there is any "right" answer to this as we all have different views and requirements.

For myself, I do not create Residence, Occupations, etc., facts from a Census record but instead record these on the Census fact itself. My reasoning being that, for the former, it is only a record of where they were on the day of the census rather than a record of where they live (okay, probably 98% will be recorded in their homes!). For many people their occupation remained unchanged for multiple Census records (indeed, for some, it was unchanged throughout their whole life). On my website I don't want a series of identical facts listing the same occupation every 10 years.

Depending on how you view things, you could consider using the Change Any Fact plugin to change, say, the Residence fact to a Census fact. Alternatively you could consider re-entry of the Census records - this would give you some consistency as you use AS (turning off the options to auto create Residence and Occupation facts to avoid duplication).

I'm sure others on the forum will be able to offer other options / things for consideration.

The simplest option is to ignore the online suggestions if you are happy with your data as it is.

However, to be consistent with your AS entries, as Brent proposed, you can use the Change Any Fact Tag plugin to convert your Residence facts to Census events whilst preserving all the associated details. The plugin has a Date filter so only Residence facts that match a specific census date will get converted, but then the plugin must be repeated for each census decade.