Family Historian User Group

I wonder if I could ask for forum members assistance?

I am a Scottish Genealogist and my partner has written a Birth Date Calculator program for me.

It is different in that it uses the Census Enumerator's protocols to calculate the birth date range, which means it is very accurate. I have found it extremely useful and have decided to market it.

UK, USA, Canada and Ireland censuses covered, as well as any other dated documents which state an age.

There is a free trial version available at:

http://www.ourscots.com/Birth_Date_Calculator.htm

I would be most grateful for your comments and feedback to test the water before we expand our range of Genealogy tools.

Many thanks

Jo



ID:2710

Dear Jo,

Thanks for making this tool available for trial.

I have just installed it and tested it with one date to make sure it was working. When I have more time, I will run some trials with people in my database whose birth dates are known. I have some census entries and other documents with known discrepancies (giving the age of the person as of the upcoming birthday rather than the age on Census Day) so they should make a good trial.

However, on my Win98 system there are serious problems with cosmetics. My display is set to 1024 x 768, but since i have a small monitor, I use the 'large fonts' setting.

Because of that, the text on the gold oblong buttons on the census tab which read 'clear all for another [search]' and 'clear age for another [search]' over-run the button color.

Also, the 'census' and 'other document' tabs do not look like tabs, since the words do not line up with the color areas intended for the tabs.

I can size the window by moving the lower right corner as one would expect, but there is no visible place to grab. Also, I don't see any buttons to close or maximize/minimize the window.

In short, the calculator appears to be working just fine. The exit button closes the calculator, the question mark pulls up the instructions file, the button on the census tab for 'about this census' fetches the appropriate data. But it looks very strange under my setup. (I'll try to get some screenshots later tonight when I have more time.)

My personal preference is for uncluttered interfaces with lots of whitespace (e.g. FHUG's website) rather than those with a lot of fancy design elements; I find them easier to read.

The idea behind the calculator is certainly a good one. Once I get a new computer, if the display is less strange-looking, I might consider purchasing the calculator, but for now, I already have similar tools built in to other software.

I hope these comments help.

Jan

Dear Jan

Indeed they do help, thank you.

We did seriously misjudge the variety of screen settings that people use, someone else contacted us off-forum to let us know this.  This issue has now be corrected and will appear as intended on all monitors and screen settings.

We are just putting in a few tweaks here and there and the new version should be up on the site by the weekend.

We will email everyone who has the software with a link to the new version (as we will do for all future improvements).

Thanks again for your input, it really is much appreciated.

Kind regards
Jo

You're welcome -- I look forward to seeing the new version.

Jan

Sorry to sound like an old cynic, but I couldn't help commenting on this... Most of our 19th century relations lived in two-up two-down cottages and had up to a dozen kids. More often than not they didn't spell their names the same way twice, let alone remember their ages. And ask any woman (even now) how old her children are and you stand a fair chance of getting something like 'he'll be 13 this year'. And we have a lot of examples of people whose claimed age changes dramatically over the years, you need other clues to guess the truth. And remember that the purpose of censuses is to count people, not to identify them, even though that's what we mainly use them for now. The enumerator didn't really care whether he got their ages (or even their names) right, as long as he listed them all in the right place.

The claim that any piece of software can turn this information into anything more accurate than 'within a year or so (probably)' seems extrordinary to me.

Hi Chris

You're absolutely correct [smile]

The Birth Date Calculator gives a specific time period to start looking in for the birth record, but works off the 'age given' on the document, so the result is dependent on the information supplied!

It does, however take into account the various census rounding protocols (age last birthday, age next birthday, British 1841 census etc) when calculating results.

But if the bride knocked 5 years off her age on the marriage certificate.....

Jo

Hi Jo
There is a similar free date of birth calculator at:

http://www.f-tree.org.uk/index.php

which you may care to see.

Regards
John

jcm said:
There is a similar free date of birth calculator at:
http://www.f-tree.org.uk/index.php

... which if I put this year and my present age (as a custom event) says 'The Date of Birth was between 1 - 00 - 1948 and - 00 - 1949'!

I had the same problem, but it works correctly if you type the month as a number,ie 1,2,3 etc, not Jan, Feb!

Hi John

Thanks for the link - that looks like a handy tool to have.

I needed a program I could take with me on my laptop to places with no internet connection - General Registers of Scotland, the library and so on.

We have now made some amendments to the Trial Version, as a result of input from everyone, so thank you all for your comments, and further comments will be gratefully received!

Jo [smile]

Hi Jo et al

I too see the benefit of having programs installed on the computer.

Using online software can take a while to get a result by the time you have logged on, found the site then got to the page.

Like the new version, it's a bit less 'busy'.

Also liked the fact that I just had to download the new version without having to uninstall the original.

Cheers

The new version looks much better on my setup -- thanks!

One comment on 1841. A kind soul did a census lookup for me and sent a transcription. When I put in the ages for the members of this family, I get a warning that the age is unlikely because the age was supposed to be rounded down to the nearest 5 years if the person was over 15.

I always remember that there is some issue with rounding with 1841, but I usually forget which groups were rounded and how the rounding was supposed to be done. I suppose it's possible the census-taker ignored the rule and wrote the actual age in some cases, but it's useful to have this warning, and very useful to have the calculator give the five-year range for the ages which end in five, and thus would seem to be correctly rounded.

Also, it would be useful if you could allow for the fractional ages over 12 months -- for the US Censuses -- even though the census taker was not asked to do so for children over a year, one often sees ages such as '1 7/12'.

If I enter '19 months' as a work-around, the calculator now reports that I have entered an unlikely age, and refuses to do the calculation.

I would rather have the calculator accept the work-around entry of '19 months' and perform the calculation -- and yes, let it give me a warning, as it does for the 1841 census in GB, that the age was not supposed to be entered that way.

But these mal-formed entries are often the ones I would most like to have the calculator for -- they are the ones for which I might need to run alternative ages as an experiment.

For ordinary entries, one can do a spreadsheet in Excel -- your calculator is better, of course, since it keeps track of the changes in census day. But for these fractional ages, it is not a simple and quick task to fire up the spreadsheet and crank out a formula. I would be much more likely to purchase and keep this calculator if it could handle these odd out-of-bounds entries.

One minor quibble -- since I am working mostly in the 20th century and early 19th, I rarely enter data from 1790-1840. I prefer having the more modern censuses at the top of the drop-down list rather than at the bottom. For the UK and Canada, the list is not as long, so it is not so bad, but for the USA, we will have to slide down almost every time we use the calculator.

Also, I see that you have some of the off-decade censuses for Canada -- there are similar ones for some states in the US, so adding those might make your calculator more attractive for US users researching those states, although the 'other documents' calculator should work nicely for those years.

Thanks again for the opportunity to give feedback.

Jan

Some observations...

1. I was a bit concerned about what it's doing for the improbabe amount of time between clicking it in the start menu and getting the Trial Version box. Including incidentally rattling my disk drives. If I was paranoid I'd think you were collecting information about my system.

2. The form is sizable but the contents don't respond to being resized. It seems to use an unnecessary amount of my screen considering I have a source document and my family tree open at the same time when I want to use it. (This looks even more silly on the Instructions form).

3. The Scottish flag responds to being clicked by opening a web page without the usual warning of a pointy-finger cursor or underlining, and also does the same to right-click, which is generally considered a safe way of changing focus without actioning anything.

4. Ages of infants are often recorded in days or weeks (as well as months and fractions as pointed above).

5. A lot of our ancestors (or their enumerators) didn't understand or ignored the 1841 age rounding... We usually take adult ages that are not multiples of 5 to be roughly correct rather than incorrectly rounded.

6. I did the same test as on the web thingy, that is entered this year and my age. This time I got 'Please enter a valid date' rather than an invalid answer... But not all sources are accurately dated. It might even be useful to be able to specify a range, such as 'he was 88 between 1849 and 1852', or more commonly perhaps 'he was 88 in Q4 1901'

7. It might be worth checking the effect of Tab an arrow keys on your forms, and how to use the buttons at the top with the keyboard.

ChrisBowyer said:
2. The form is sizable but the contents don't respond to being resized. It seems to use an unnecessary amount of my screen considering I have a source document and my family tree open at the same time when I want to use it. (This looks even more silly on the Instructions form).

Don't you have a dual-monitor setup at home? [wink]

Seriously, though, I agree with you -- I have a small monitor, and could easily have the source document, Family Historian, and an Excel spreadsheet or Notepad file open at the same time, not to mention Gedcom Census. Even if one doesn't have FH and GC open, you need some kind of note file open to place the results of the calculation until you can get them into FH.

A smaller, kinder window size would make this calculator much handier.

Jan

Jo, could I suggest that you have a look at the Interface Hall of Shame to get some idea about how Windows programs are expected to work. The IHoS doesn't say how a program should work, but it does give lots of examples of classic bloopers.

The site is (currently) here - http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/shame.htm

I must add that FH is a repeat offender of some of the bloopers on the IHoS but that's doesn't mean you can't do better.

Wow, many thanks for the input!

To Jan:
It would seem that the Enumerators did sometimes ignore instructions on the 1841 British Census and that's why we let what is (in theory) an improbable age pass to a result. We give the warning to alert the user to a possible typo.
Thank you for the advice on the fractional presentation. Consider this implemented on a future upgrade.
With regard to the order in which the dates are presented, we had not considered reversing the order until now. We may introduce it as a user defined option. Thanks for the tip.
Yes, we do have some provincial Canadian censuses entered. It is our intention to include more countries and their provinces/states. Since we consider the Enumerator's Instructions and protocols central to giving the result, all these smaller censuses need to be researched before we can add them.
As always, everyone who downloads the program will be notified when there are free upgrades available. Thank you Jan.

To Chris:
Nothing gets past you eh Chris [wink]

re your comment 1:
When you first run the program it does take a few seconds to fire up as it is creating files. These files are used to remember the preferences (e.g. which Census country is your 'default'). Also, you are quite right, your drive is activated as we use its serial number as part of the unlock process. (the info stays on your computer by the way). This is a common method however we have removed that part of code for the next release as we can see it may make some folk think we are 'up to no good'!

Comment 2:
The screen control is part of a two-part refinement. We were keen to enable folk with really quirky screen settings to be able to use the calculator so rolled this version out. The second part will be included when we have sorted an .ocx file registration issue (I will take my partners word for that one). Once done, everything will be resizable including the text and controls.

2a. Yes, the screen is bigger than it needs to be just now. We have left it fairly large to make room for a new feature (multiple simultaneous calculations). You will also be pleased to learn that we are working on the program running in an optional 'compressed' state. The window will only be the height of two text boxes and can sit out the way at the base of your screen.

3. Ha ha, there is no keeping secrets from you Chris. You are correct, the Saltire flag was going to be a 'secret' button for users who have subscribed to our Genealogy Newsletter to get special offers.  We will have to think of something else now [wink]

4. Point taken. It will be included in the next upgrade. Many thanks for pointing that out to us.

5. We agree. The program works on the same assumption.

6. Thank you. We will do just that.

Many thanks for all your detailed comments, they are much appreciated!

Jo