Family Historian User Group

Hi All,

This just happened to me tonight and wondered if anyone can point me in the direction of what happened. I had been trying out Ancestral Sources to see whether I was going to give it one last chance or keep with just FH7. After I had finished, and I deleted the FH/AS trial project file I tried to open my reference file and I got the message "Unable to open file" see screen shot. I noticed that my Project and the Sample Project both wouldn't open giving the same message, I also noticed that both files now say Last updated 01/01/1971. I restored a back-up and that works fine. The project file is in its folder and when I try to open it by double clicking, I get the same message as is in the screen shot.

Have I done something wrong or has FH had a hissy fit because I was using DEA's and AS then deleting the files?

The Last Update values of 01/01/1971 are a major alarm suggesting the GEDCOM files or other key files are broken or missing.
That date is the default date used when no actual date can be obtained from the GEDCOM file.

I wonder how you deleted the trial Project. Did you use the FH Project Window More Tasks... > Delete Project option or did you use Windows File Explorer to delete Project folder files? The latter is fraught with danger and if you used that method probably deleted the wrong files. The Project File is only a tiny settings file. The real database is in the GEDCOM file.

The Family Historian Sample Project is easily recovered via More Tasks... > Samples > Reset Sample Project

Your ... Family (Reference Only) (2) project has been recovered from backups.

Have you lost significant amounts of data subsequent to the backups that would be worth trying to recover, or are you happy to clean up what you have and rename the recovered project to remove the (2) suffix?

Hi Mike

There is no lost data as I had just backed up the file, so there is no issue there. I deleted using the More Tasks, Delete Project so not me for once . Everything is back to normal: When I deleted the broken files using More Tasks/ Delete Project everything seemed to be there, they just didn't want to open.