Family Historian User Group

Hi folks,

I’m on version 5.0.9 of FH and I’m trying to export a gedcom file for loading up onto a family history website.

I don’t want anyone to see the notes I’ve added in the Individual Records, so in the “Export Gedcom File” window, I have selected “Exclude: Note Records, Submitter Records, One-Member Family Records, Source Records, Submission Records, Unconnected Records, Repository Records, [[Private]] Notes and Multimedia Records”, but when I check the file in FH, I find that the Individual notes have been carried across.

What am I doing wrong?

It's worth remembering there are two main sorts of Notes local notes and record notes.

Using the export option removes note records, but not local ones.

One option would be to set the living flag on everyone in your exported file and then use the Clean living people plugin to delete the notes.

If you need to do the export on a regular basis, it's pretty easy to write a version of the Clean Living people query which cleans everyone and not just living people.

Hello Eric.

There are a great many Note fields in FH.
Almost every entity in the database has one, such as Records, Facts, Citations, etc...

Exclude Note records only applies to shared Note Records as listed in the Records Window on the Notes tab.

Any other local Note fields as shown in the Property Box on the Notes tab, or Facts tab, or elsewhere, are governed by Exclude [[private]] notes and only has any effect if you have enclosed private notes in double square brackets [[ ]].

If those local Notes are private only because they relate to Living Individuals, then it might be better to exclude them entirely from the exported GEDCOM rather than just the Notes.
There are tools to help with that job if you are interested in that route.

Could you say what type of "family history website" you intend to use, because there may be advice we could offer for particular web based products.

The notes I'm referring to are in the individual property box and they apply to both living and dead people. I want to exclude all of them, for the sake of privacy for the living and to avoid potential embarrassment for the living relatives of the dead.

I've successfully created gedcoms from FH in the past without these notes, the most recent being in December, but I can't for the life of me think how I did it.

The type of websites I'm talking about are Ancestry, The Genealogist and Genes Reunited.

Thanks,

Eric

Another approach is to use File > Split Tree Helper instead of File > Import Export >Export Gedcom.
The Split Tree helper includes an option to Delete all Note Fields within Records.

Or you can use Lorna's suggestion on the file you have exported.

I have attached a quick plugin which deletes all local notes from anywhere on the Individual or Family Records.

Hi Jane,

As you can probably tell, I'm not all that familiar with how FH works.

What do you do with the plugin?

Thanks,

Eric

Well done Lorna. You've hit the nail right on the head. I knew I'd done it time and time again in the past, but just couldn't recall how.

The most important thing to remember about using the Split Tree function for this job is to take a copy of the gedcom from the project file and split the copy, not the original, otherwise you lose all the notes and anything else you opted to delete.

Many thanks,

Eric

Just download load by clicking on it and then double click it to install it to FH. You can then run it from the Tools>Plugins menu.

See
plugins:about#downloading_and_using_plugins|Downloading and Using Plugins

for more information.

Glad that solved your problem. The Help files for the Export Gedcom Dialog suggest using the Export to do most of the work, then using the Split Tree Helper on the resulting file for more 'fine-grained' control. However, I imagine it is quite a common requirement to remove all types of note so it is a bit surprising that this option is not already built in to the Export options.

I agree, Lorna, but at least the functionality is there, if you know where to look for it. My problem was that I didn't appreciate that the option to delete "Note Records" was quite specific to one particular record type, rather than all types of note records... if you get what I mean.

Eric

Hi Jane,

Just tried the plugin and it works a treat. So now I have two ways of doing it.

Thanks,

Eric