Family Historian User Group

Well, after a few good sales on eBay, I've taken the plunge and ordered Family Historian v.4.

I have been using Brother's Keeper for the last 10 years but feel it's beginning to look a bit tired ..................

I will, of course, keep BK around for a while yet until I get the hang of FH, but can I expect any problems transferring my information over by GEDCOM?

Regards, Ann.


ID:3766

I don't know BK so I am not sure how good it's GEDCOM is, but as long as it exports all the data most problems will be resolvable.

So my advice, try it and see, if you have any problems highlighted come back and some one will try and help.

I can't speak for Brothers Keeper but I have just converted after many years as a 'Legacy' user. Based on my experience you will probably have to do the export in gedcom format several times until you have eliminated the uncategorised data and got a reasonable level of data conversion. Some of your data in Brothers Keeper may have to be moved from non gedcom fields to Gedcom recognised fields before it will work OK. Having given you the 'bad' news I would urge you to stick with the data conversions and the relatively high learning curve because FH4 is well worth it in the end.

I've come across 4 BK v6 files varying in size from 2K to 600K and had minimal problems with them. What I did have problems with was a) the email address in submitter records, b) BK not ensuring that dates follow the Gedcom style (US style dates were intermingled with Gedcom style dates), c) source media type using an invalid Gedcom tag (MEDI), d) individual attributes appearing in family records.

I can't speak for v4, but I bought FH v3 at the end of last year, after using BK since its DOS days. Although I upgraded to each version of BK, over the years I knew I had entered data in 'blank fields' which subsequently got used by the program, and never got round to sorting it out.

I did a few trials exports and decided the best way in the end was to go through each individual in turn and 'tidy up' the mis-entered data and sources, before doing a final export. With over 5,000 names it was time consuming, but it exported error-free!

I kept the BK files for ages afterwards, but didn't need to refer to them. As soon as I starting using FH I didn't want to look back - entering data in 'tree view' is so wonderful!

Good luck with the transfer!

Many thanks all for your advice.

My parcel came today .............. so guess I'm going to be busy this weekend!

Ann.