Family Historian User Group

I don't know if you can help me but I hope so!
I have been tracing my family history since 1983. I used to travel to London from Bristol where I used to live as often as I could. The purpose was to search through every quarter of the GRO indexes from 1937 onwards looking for my family name. having achieved that I eventually entered the lists in to Exel. My question is:- Is it possible to transfer these records to Family Historian without linking all the names to my family tree. What I am wanting to do is to look at the list independently and select a person from the list and add to my family tree as and when I prove a connection to it.
Am I currently asking the impossible?
Ed

I have no idea whether this works but a web search found this which is by Colin Spencer a regular contributor to the FHUG website and someone who has been helped me to test Ancestral Sources.

http://orba-design.com/genealogy/
(Edit: updated link based on Colin's reply below)

From what I can see it may do what you want. I notice that the PDF instructions (which you would need to follow carefully) says:

I wrote this to assist in getting information from the US SSDI that I had scraped into Excel into Family Historian, which is my programme of choice.

I suspect that format of dates may be an issue for you and may need some processing in Excel before import but I'm sure you can achieve what you need to do by a combination of editing in Excel or in Family Historian following the import.

Hope this helps

Nick

Thank you very much Nick! I am getting a bit old now for this sort of thing but, I will certainly give it a try. Thanks once again!
Ed

Ed

If you need any specific help let me know. I do have a couple of bespoke versions that I have created for people with specific needs of different input fields.

A better link is http://orba-design.com/genealogy/

Hi Colin

I've updated my original reply above to use this url. Now that you're also involved I'm sure Ed will be able to achieve his objective!

Best wishes

Nick

I am joining this thread belatedly because I have been busy that last couple of days.

Firstly, Ed, you shouldn't need to waste time and money travelling to London to obtain GRO BMD Index records.
These are readily available online for free with search options for Name and Registration District, etc.
See research:index|> Genealogy Research for loads of advice, in particular FreeBMD is free, as is Ancestry via the Library.

Regarding importing from Excel there are some utilities in the FHUG Downloads that might be worth a look:
fhugdownloads:contents:fix2ged_ged2fix|> Utility ~ FIX2GED and GED2FIX
fhugdownloads:contents:acc2ged|> Utility ~ ACC2GED (CSV to GEDCOM)
It all rather depends on how you have structured your Excel data.

All the above utilities and the one mentioned by Nick & Colin are designed to import your whole Excel database.
But you wanted to selectively import individuals.

Perhaps one way to achieve that is to import all your Excel data into a separate FH Project.
Then you can selectively Export Individuals in GEDCOM format and import them into your main Project.

I assumed Ed was referring to travelling to London to make this list back in the 80s and 90s before they became available more widely on the Internet.

Yes that was my thought too (although I should have put it in my reply!), that the excel lists could be imported into a totally different gedcom file and then individuals merged into the main file.

Thank you all so much for your great replies to my question. I'm sure that I will be able to sort something out for myself between all of your ideas. Yes Nick you are right it was back in the 1980's that I went through the books. To my knowledge there was no internet then. At least not for the general public. The did introduce the GRO indexes in the Bristol Reference Library but that was way after my travels. That's life for you! Thank you all once again for your suggestions and I will feedback to you when I have sorted it out. I still find it difficult to understand why none of the family history software developers have not just added a simple database facility to the programme. It would just save people who are researching one name, in addition to their personal family from having to interact with separate programmes.
Ed