Family Historian User Group

Reading file generated by UFT I get line rejected because:-
Record Type=Individual Id=I840
l.504 - Skipped invalid line           : '1  ALIA Catherine /SHARP/'

This is an alias.
Is this the correct tag?
If not what should it be?

ID:125

No it is not a valid GEDCOM tag.

You could change it to 1 NAME which will mean anyone with an alias gets two name records.

Personally I retyped my 'Alias' fields into the correct fields within FH as I did not have too many.

That's odd - I had the same trouble and on looking at a list of valid GEDCOM tags there was one defined for ALIA meaning ALIAS of course.  I loaded my GEDCOM file (from FTM) into Wordpad and converted all ALIA tags to NICK - for NICKNAME - and that works OK.  Not sure that alias and nickname mean quite the same thing but I meant nickname in any case.  FH accepts NICK quite happily but not ALIA.

There is an ALIA tag and it does occur at level 1 within an Individual record, but it cannot be used to store a name.  It is used to store a link to another Individual record.  I don't recommend doing this but GEDCOM supports having multiple records for the same person, linked using the ALIA tag.  Family Historian is correct to flag it as an error because 'Catherine /SHARP/' is just a name.  Its not a record link.

Thanks, Simon, for the Alias note - it is much clearer now what is going wrong.  FTM exports the nickname after a level 1 ALIA tag as a name not a link.  The ALIA tag seems to pop up anywhere within the individual record - not just after the NAME line.  It doesn't appear to matter which target one choses for the GEDCOM file being exported (ROOTS, PAF, FTM etc).

Changing ALIA to NICK stops one error but the NICK line is still in the wrong place and not at level 2.  So one has to move the line and change the level to correct the fault. That can be just as easy within FH itself rather than play around with Find and Replace within Wordpad.

Thus, there is still a snag in switching regularly from FTM to FH - which I do because friends and relatives, here and abroad, have FTM but not FH (yet).