Family Historian User Group

Hello Forum,
usually a report in genealogy starts with a certain person and then it lists all ancestors, descendants or both of this person.

But I need a type of report which loops through all families and lists husband, wife and children. Important is that all families are listed, whether they are related to each other or not.

Is this possible with FH7?

Thanks a lot,
M. Born

There is a Family Group Sheet report which could be used to list all families.
Use Publish > Family Group Sheet, then click Select and choose the Families tab in the Select Records dialog. Then click the >> icon in the centre to select all the family records.

By default the report will include more details than you want, but it can be tailored to exclude most details other than the basic names and dates.

Thank you very much, Lorna. As I'll be on vacation next week I'll download the trial version after and test it out.

I just downloaded the trial version of FH and created the report. Is it possible to add a unique number to each family and also to show the corresponding numbers of e.g. the families of the children (when they got married and have their own families)?

Yes, it is possible to list the Family Record Id for every partnership of each person in the report.

In the Report > Options > Contents tab, under Family Member Main Items (in order), click Add... button.
Set Label: to Family Id
Set Expression: to =RecordId(%INDI.FAMS[1]>%) =RecordId(%INDI.FAMS[2]>%) =RecordId(%INDI.FAMS[3]>%)
Then click Add button.

That will display the unique Record Id of each Spouse Family record to which the person belongs.

Hello again,
thanks a lot for showing how to add the family number to the report but it's not the result I really wanted. I need a report similiar to this example:

<628>
Dette - Buchart
Husband: Dette, Christoph <609>, m, Raschmacher; *21.02.1784 in Dingelstaedt; +in Dingelstaedt; witness: Kirchberg, Christoph.
Family-Data: Koo 19.02.1816 in Dingelstaedt; witness: Kirchberg, Christoph; Kirchberg, Heinrich; Waldhelm, Joannes; Helbach, Peter.
Wife: Buchart, Katharina <422>, f, *07.12.1786_R ; +11.01.1843 in Dingelstaedt.
1. child: Dette, Philipp <oo648>, m, rk, ~26.08.1821 in Dingelstaedt; +26.08.1869 in Dingelstaedt; witness: Weißenstein,
Philipp.
2. child: Dette, Maria Katharina <oo548, oo3929>, f; ~29.07.1830 in Dingelstaedt; witness: Dette, Maria Katharina.

Shown is family <628>. The parents of the husband can be found in family <609>, of the wife in <422>. The families of the children can be found in <648> and <548> and <3929>.

In the way Mike showed me the numbers are hidden in the report text and I found no way to add them to the "header" of the report entry. Is it possible to create such a custom report I listed above?

Thanks a lot in advance,
M. Born

Marco, I don't recognise your example as any of the FH standard Reports.
I guess your example is taken from a report produced by some other product. Which product is that?

The only FH report that provides the family groups you requested is the Family Group Sheet.
So it would be easier if you could use that report and explain how you want it modified.

By default, a Family Group Sheet displays all the Facts recorded for each person, which is much more than your example.
However, the Report > Options > Contents tab allows any subset of Facts (Events/Attributes) to be included/excluded.
Also, it may be possible to add the Family Record Id after each person's Name instead of on a separate line.

If we cannot get FH to produce the report details you require, then another solution is to export the FH Project GEDCOM back to your current product and create the report there.

Hello Mike,
the example I showed was origionally created by a german product which is based on DOS and Dbase. The author already died and no support is available anymore. As the tool is based on Gedcom 5 only several Gedcom options from Gedcom 5.5 or 7 are not supported and would be lost.

I don't want an exact copy of the report I posted. I jut wanted to illustrate the way how the family numbers are used as a way to navigate through all the families. It would be great to customize the FH report so that they can be added to the header line for the family itself. The IDs for parents and children can be a seperate line added to the respective person.

Is this possible?

Yes, that is easily possible.
You may have noticed that the FH convention is to display Record Id inside square brackets, e.g. [321]

So to add the Family Record Id to the Family Group Sheet header use the following customisation.
Use the Report > Options > Format tab.
In the bottom pane, select the Heading Record and click Edit...
Change the Heading Text to {default} [=RecordId()] and click OK.
Click OK again, and may be click Refresh Report on the right.

That will now be automatically applied to any Family Group Sheet report.
However, it is advisable to preserve such customised reports for future use.
So use Save Report As... > Custom Report Type... and give it a memorable Custom Report Name.
Thereafter, you will find it in Publish > Custom Reports and the standard report can be reset to its default settings by using the Restore Defaults button on each customised tab.

That general technique will work for the header of most Reports.

=RecordId() is one of many functions used to customise FH in various ways.
See the FHUG Knowledge Base article Understanding Functions and the related articles.

I followed you suggestions and tried out some options to optimize the results. I often get error messages like
Error in plugin function "FH_GetMiscellaneousText". Stop calling plugin? or Error in plugin function "FH_GetAttributeValueText". Stop calling plugin?
I did not install any plugins.
Sometimes FH crashes during the report creation process. I also noticed that the Index and Header/Footer are not displayed although I activated them.
What can I do to eliminate these errors?

I can't help you with the odd error messages about plugins (Mike will no doubt be able to shed some light on that) but I know the issues of missing Headers and Footers has been resolved. This bug appeared in the very recent release of v7.0.14 and was reported to Calico Pie yesterday. They have now fixed it in v 7.0.15. Click on "Check for Updates" on the Help menu, within Family Historian, and follow the instructions to upgrade.

I don't know whether the index was also missing in v7.0.14 but I have just tried creating a set of Family Group sheets in v7.0.15 and the index appears OK.

Thanks, Lorna. I installed the most recent version 2 days ago and did not see that an update was available yesterday. I will see if the error is gone later this day.

Are you using a Language pack? those errors could be caused by errors in the language packs plugin code.

I did not install any language pack. In the report I set the report language to german. I'm not sure if any pre-installed languages could cause the error. If I change the language setting to "untranslated" then the error messages do not appear.

After the update the header and footer are displayed correctly so this error is fixed.

If I want to create the report with about 8000 individuals then the index still is not created.

Do the error messages only appear when you try to customise the report? This might be a limitation in the current capabilities of the language translation. The Help files for How to Produce Reports in Different Languages (which you can access from the link in the Language tab of the Report Options) says that “All reports support language packs to some degree, but some are not fully language pack ready (or may not be). The ones that aren't, or may not be, are custom reports, and some of the reports in the Miscellaneous category.”

The German language pack was written by Calico Pie themselves so I suggest you contact them via http://support.calico-pie.com/open.php explaining exactly which report you are using and when the error messages occur. Also tell them about the problem with the index when creating a very long report.

They usually respond fairly quickly but this will be a long holiday weekend in the UK so there might be a delay.

Thanks Lorna. I'm in contact with them now and I hope they can solve the problems.