Family Historian User Group

I've been trying to achieve something akin to what Paul Baines (Article - Census Record Summary By Household) has been using on MS Excel for census and BMD record summaries.  I want to show more detail in the BMD/will/probate areas, but am too lazy to keep updating lots of spreadsheets manually.

I've not achieved all I really want yet, but thought I'd offer it to the User Group and see if anyone had any suggestions to sort out the final bit, or confirm that I have to do it outside FH.

What I have done is create a custom query that lists all people of a given surname, with an exception to exclude those in a list that includes everyone in the generation above me, my generation, or the one(s) below.

The result is listed by Name and Record Id number (just to separate out any similar aged duplicates, e.g. cousins).

The information extracted in the other columns is :-
Birth Date
Birth Cert Ref
Marriage Date
Marriage Cert Ref    
Will Date
Will Source Ref.
Death Date
Death Cert Ref
Probate Date
Probate Grant Ref
Census 1901    
Census 1891    
Census 1881    
Census 1871    
Census 1861    
Census 1851    
Census 1841

The references all use 'Where in source'.

All the Census entries are put in using sing Nick Walker's GEDCOM Census, so each census houshold has a source record but then I have to manually enter a 'where in source' entry for each person's own Census record that is linked to the census source records.  I have created another query (based on a standard one) to find all the links to a particular source and then check to see if I've done it correctly.

What I get of course is a set of census entries jumbled across the columns, as the only way to get all is to have 7 INDI.CENS[X].SOUR.PAGE lines, where [x] is 1 to 7, and it then depends on who was enumerated in which census as to how many columns they fill.

What I'd like to know, is there a way of getting the columns in the results of queries to be specific to a particular date ?
I don't think there is, so the only recourse will be to add census record entry dates and then, after transfer to the spreadsheet, run a macro to shuffle the entries to the relevant column.

One thing worth knowing - you can simply highlight the result table with the mouse, copy (CTRL-C) and switch over to your spread sheet (ALT-Tab) and paste (CRTL-V) the data straight in, no need to mess about with CSV files.

http://www.fhug.org.uk/images/uploads/L ... y_name.fhq

Oh, BTW, there are several forum postings of the URL http://www.familyhistrorian.ip3.com, however I get an 'Error resolving server's IP address', can anyone say why ?

ID:682

What do you put in the 'where in source'? This is usually used to explain whereabouts in the source the information will be found. As this is a household record I would have thought this wouldn't be of use, unless you are entering that the data is on the 2nd line of the source or the 4th line, etc. If you are using this to record the census reference then that should really be recorded with the source (e.g. in its title) rather than the citation. I'm interested because whenever possible I like to make Gedcom Census able to deal with the wide variety of ways that people record information and I might be able to add your way to the next version.

This website used to be hosted by a different company and had the url you mention. So some older posts might have links which refer to it. I expect Jane could probably do a search and replace for this?

I have put a compressed version of the PRO ref for the census entries into the Where in Source, e.g. HO107/1347/6/p18 for HO107 Piece 1347, folio 6, Page 18. This is the same as central part of the data that GEDCM Census (GC) creates as the Source Title.  I did try using the Short Title entry for the Source Record, but once any entry is placed in there, FH replaces the Title text with the Short Title text, so I resorted to entering a Where in Source in the Individual records.  In a way I'm taking Method 1 and the consequent larger number of Census records (1 per houshold per census) along with a bit of Method 2.

This also (I think) makes sense whan I come to doing Probate and BMD entries as they have similar Register entries, as primarily I'm trying to show that I have a piece of real evidence (either in PDF on a disc or a copy certificate).  The whole idea of the Query I posted is to help me work out what I have to find next.  So I might have a source record, but no Where in Source entry if I don't have the document in my hands.  I wouldn't therefore necessarily want an automatic entry created from the input boxes in GC.

I've also had to decide just what I was going to define as repositories, sources and citations.  I'd following the various discusions in the archived forum entries, that you and others had had and it seemed to me that one of the strengths of FH is that you can make these definitions yourself, but probably need to be a fairly experienced genealogist to do understand the consequences properly (which I'm not).  However, I have based my definition on lines that you have expressed via the way that GC works in default settings and have bitten the bullet in having to put up with a future of many Source records.

On the presumption that a repository can be a set of data CDs (e.g. I have the S&N Data Yorkshire Census sets for 1841 through 1891), therefore Where in Source is the PRO index (with probably an additional reference to the specific CD and PDF image page number).

What I'm not sure of however is your automatic definition of a Census entry as secondary evidence, I agree with it if you are only using indices, however once you have a sound copy of the census records, isn't that primary evidence ? Therefore, what chance of making a future version of Gedcom Census allow the user to select the level of Certainty Assessment at entry ?

Thanks for your comments, I now understand the reasoning.

To be honest the 'Secondary Evidence' was based on a suggestion from a Gedcom Census user just after I first released it and it seemed sensible at the time (a census entry being a copy of the details which were told to an enumerator by someone in the household). However, I do understand the arguments for why it might be considered primary evidence so in the new version of Gedcom Census I made the evidence assessment an option.

If all goes to plan you should be able to download this by the end of the week.