* Problem Launching Ancestral Sources

[MeganF]

I have Family Historian 5.0.11 and Ancestral Sources 4.0.1 installed on a couple of laptops. I must admit I have been moving data (i.e. the Family Historian Projects folder) back and forth between the PC's so there may be some settings I have messed up. I am now trying to add some new sources through Ancestral Sources and I have found that the program just stops responding when I open some of my project files. These seem to be the ones I have updated after a backup in August (when I merged quite a few records into the project). I have installed both Family Historian and Ancestral Sources on a third laptop and can open the test project and a small project I typed on from scratch, but any project created from a new project generated with a GEDCOM won't open in Ancestral Sources.

I am going crazy trying all sorts of combinations etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Megan

[NickWalker]

Hi Megan

It's difficult to know what the problem might be and it doesn't sound like anything I've had reported before. If you would be happy to email to me a copy of one of your Gedcom files that seems to have a problem I could take a look for you? Just in case you don't know how to locate the file: in Windows Explorer go into a project folder (e.g. let's say its called 'Tree') and then into the folder that ends in .fh_data_(e.g. Tree.fh_data) and then send me a copy of the file within which will show up as the same name as the project (e.g. Tree or Tree.ged) and will probably have a green Family Historian icon. My email address is nick At Ancestralsources dot com.

Best wishes

Nick

[tatewise]

This may be cheeky to ask, but when you say "any project created from a new project generated with a GEDCOM won't open in Ancestral Sources" exactly what commands do you use to create such a Project?

What do you mean by "won't open in Ancestral Sources"? What are the error messages?

[NickWalker]

What do you mean by "won't open in Ancestral Sources"? What are the error messages?

Megan said in her original post:

the program just stops responding when I open some of my project files

[MeganF]

I have found the cause of the problem. I had merged a Gedcom file into my main database that I had received from a fellow researcher. This new file contained an individual with a birth date of "Nov 0014". Family Historian did not have a problem with this date - I even ran the Validate routine and it was fine. However, Ancestral Sources didn't like this date - as soon as I deleted the date from the individual Ancestral Sources worked perfectly.

Many thanks to Nick Walker for taking the time to work with my files and try to solve the problem.

Megan

[NickWalker]

However, Ancestral Sources didn't like this date - as soon as I deleted the date from the individual Ancestral Sources worked perfectly.

Just to clarify a little. in my tests Megan's file loads into Ancestral Sources without any problem and has no issue with this date. However, it may be related to Megan using US date formats rather than UK so that's something I'll have to investigate.

Nick

[NickWalker]

Just to confirm that AS did have issues dealing with years from nearly 2000 years ago when running on a PC in the USA. It turns out that there were other issues with 2 digit years where, for example, AS would consider the year 14 to be shorthand for 2014 and so age calculations were wrong. I believe this is all fixed in the next version so if you manage to trace your family trees back 2000 years, you'll be able to use Ancestral Sources to record it