* Testing Ancestral Sources v7.6.6

[NickWalker]

Updated this post to reflect the release of test v7.6.6 that fixes a major issue that could cause baptism, birth and perhaps other entry types to produce an error. Thanks to Neil Grantham for reporting this.

I released v7.6.4 at the end of November but this was immediately followed by the release of the 1921 Scotland Census so it made sense to release an update to include a template for that and also to try to fix a small number of reported issues.

New Features in v7.6.5 (Beta Test)

• Includes a 1921 Scotland census template, adapted from a template kindly supplied by Colin McDonald.
• The 1950 USA census now displays names in Surname Given Names order. Thanks to Margaret Lawrence for pointing out that this needed to be changed.
• Fixed an issue where text could disappear from a source note when changing to a rich-text autotext or plain-text autotext template depending on the rich-text option set. Thanks to Lorna Craig for reporting this.
• Fixed a problem that could lead to auto-text wrongly reporting the user had already edited the source text. Thanks to Colin Spencer for letting me know about this.
• Made a small improvement to the source conversion system to deal with double spaces at the start or end of text, based on an issue reported by Chris Read.

The 64 bit version is available to test here: Ancestral Sources v7.6.6 64 Bit
The 32 bit version is available to test here: Ancestral Sources v7.6.6 32 Bit

Please report in this thread any issues you spot or email me (nick at ancestralsources dot com).

[LornaCraig]

Nick, I noticed that in the Scottish 1921 census template the Employment column has a drop-down menu which consists of the same options as the Status column (but spelled out in words) plus an option for "Private". I think this is probably a hang-over from the template for the English census where most of those options, with the exception of Worker, could appear in the Employment column. As the Scottish census has a specific column for status I think the only one of these options which could/should appear in the Scottish Employment column is "Private " (for use in the case of domestic servants). Otherwise the name of the employer goes in that column.

Obviously this is not a problem because any text can be typed into the box, so I'm not bothered by it but thought perhaps it worth mentioning.

[NickWalker]

Thanks Lorna. I didn't really look at that column in any detail and just assumed it had been prepopulated with some common entries. Having said that, the example from the FindMyPast page has 5 entries in that column for 'own account' and 2 for 'out of work' so I expect people didn't always follow the correct instructions. I think I might just leave it for now, as you said it doesn't really cause a problem and we have evidence of 3 of the items being used at least.

[LornaCraig]

I think you are referring to the example on the NRS (National Records of Scotland) site, because FindmyPast doesn't have the Scottish 1921 census. The NRS site does indeed have an example featuring several of the 'wrong' kind of entries in that column. In fact it's odd that they chose that particular page as an example, because it seems to have contained a number of irregularities. There are a lot of 'red ink' corrections to it!

Interestingly the NRS site also gives an example of the schedules which were completed by the householders themselves, and it looks the same as the English ones! Unfortunately we can no longer see those schedules, because as the NRS site explains "The 1921 Scottish census records are the enumeration books which contain information transcribed from the household schedules, ... The schedules were destroyed after the work on the census was completed."

If the Scottish householder schedules really were the same as the English ones (I'm not convinced) it's not surprising that some enumerators got confused, because what they had to do was not an exact transcription. Their enumerator books contained that extra column for status which wasn't on the householders' schedules, so they had to create the entries in the status column themselves and in some cases forgot to remove the same information from the employment column. But did the enumerators also have to create the data for the 'Health insurance' column and the columns for number of rooms?

[NickWalker]

I think you are referring to the example on the NRS (National Records of Scotland) site, because FindmyPast doesn't have the Scottish 1921 census. The NRS site does indeed have an example featuring several of the 'wrong' kind of entries in that column. In fact it's odd that they chose that particular page as an example, because it seems to have contained a number of irregularities. There are a lot of 'red ink' corrections to it!

Interestingly the NRS site also gives an example of the schedules which were completed by the householders themselves, and it looks the same as the English ones! Unfortunately we can no longer see those schedules, because as the NRS site explains "The 1921 Scottish census records are the enumeration books which contain information transcribed from the household schedules, ... The schedules were destroyed after the work on the census was completed."

If the Scottish householder schedules really were the same as the English ones (I'm not convinced) it's not surprising that some enumerators got confused, because what they had to do was not an exact transcription. Their enumerator books contained that extra column for status which wasn't on the householders' schedules, so they had to create the entries in the status column themselves and in some cases forgot to remove the same information from the employment column. But did the enumerators also have to create the data for the 'Health insurance' column and the columns for number of rooms?

Sorry quite right the example is on the NRS rather than FindMyPast. I agree that it does seem to be a bad example!

[neil40]

First use of this version, entering a Baptism record I got this error box when saving to FH, and the continue button fails to commit the baptism to FH.

Error info removed by Nick. Details noted thank you

[neil40]

Just to add, I re-installed 7.6.5 'over the top' and this was repeatable.

I uninstalled 7.6.5 and installed 7.6.4 and the Baptism 'save' then worked OK

[David2416]

Hi Nick,

Have just installed AS 7.6.5 - and have a question about the warning message re custom templates:
I have created many custom templates with a personalised name to distinguish from existing.
Would these be overwritten or deleted if I accepted Yes rather than No?

[NickWalker]

Hi Nick,

Have just installed AS 7.6.5 - and have a question about the warning message re custom templates:
I have created many custom templates with a personalised name to distinguish from existing.
Would these be overwritten or deleted if I accepted Yes rather than No?

Hi David

I suspect the warning you're seeing is regarding census templates

Warning.jpg (26.21 KiB) Viewed 685 times

If you have created census templates with a type/country/year that is different to those that are built into AS then they won't be overwritten if you click Yes.

There aren't any new auto-text templates in 7.6.5 but they are handled a little differently anyway and never overwrite any custom templates.

[NickWalker]

First use of this version, entering a Baptism record I got this error box when saving to FH, and the continue button fails to commit the baptism to FH.

Thanks Neil - I've now released v7.6.6 that should fix this. I'd forgotten I did a lot of tidying up of some lazy coding, but this seems to have had unintended knock-on effects so I've put the lazy coding back!

The 64 bit version is available to test here: Ancestral Sources v7.6.6 64 Bit
The 32 bit version is available to test here: Ancestral Sources v7.6.6 32 Bit

Please report in this thread any issues you spot or email me (nick at ancestralsources dot com).

[David2416]

Hi Nick,

Have just installed AS 7.6.5 - and have a question about the warning message re custom templates:
I have created many custom templates with a personalised name to distinguish from existing.
Would these be overwritten or deleted if I accepted Yes rather than No?

Hi David

I suspect the warning you're seeing is regarding census templates

Warning.jpg

If you have created census templates with a type/country/year that is different to those that are built into AS then they won't be overwritten if you click Yes.

There aren't any new auto-text templates in 7.6.5 but they are handled a little differently anyway and never overwrite any custom templates.

Yes indeed that is the warning message. Thank you for the confirmation.

[neil40]

Thanks Neil - I've now released v7.6.6 that should fix this. I'd forgotten I did a lot of tidying up of some lazy coding, but this seems to have had unintended knock-on effects so I've put the lazy coding back!

Please report in this thread any issues you spot or email me (nick at ancestralsources dot com).

So far so good.