If you've not used Ancestral Sources before then you may find the "Introduction to Ancestral Sources" video helpful. This is available on the Ancestral Sources You Tube Channel.
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Ancestral Sources will generate rich text source transcriptions allowing your source text to include tables, coloured text, fonts, etc. In addition it supports the new Family Historian 7 source templates, including the 'essentials' and 'advanced' collections. Ancestral Sources continues to support projects created in Family Historian 6 and earlier and includes additional features and improvements that will benefit users who don't upgrade to FH7 immediately.
What is Ancestral Sources?
Ancestral Sources is a very popular utility, created by Nick Walker, designed to be used in conjunction with Family Historian to allow faster, more convenient creation of Census, Birth, Baptism, Marriage, Death and Burial/Cremation records. Ancestral Sources makes adding source entries to Family Historian much quicker and easier to achieve. Simply enter the record details and allow Ancestral Sources to do all the hard work of creating Census, Birth, Baptism, Marriage, Death, Burial, Occupation linked via citations to sources and multimedia records.
Ancestral Sources pioneered a source-driven approach to entering data into Family Historian. Most of the information that is added to a family history file originates from one of just a few types of documents, namely birth, marriage and death certificates, church baptisms, marriages and burials, and census records. The concept of Ancestral Sources is that it allows the data from these source documents to be entered directly into the software, building up the family history data in a more intuitive approach than the usual methods used by genealogy applications. For example, typically entering a census household entry in a family history application requires multiple facts such as census, occupation, birth, etc. to be created for each individual, all linked back to a source via citations: a very time consuming exercise. Ancestral Sources makes this far easier and much quicker to achieve.
Ancestral Sources is highly recommended for all users of FH. The availability of Ancestral Sources is frequently cited as a key reason to use Family Historian over other genealogy applications that do not have similar functionality.
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What's new in Ancestral Sources v7.7?
I've produced a short video that talks through 4 of the new features, including the new Tree View: What's new in Ancestral Sources v7.7?
- There is now a new 'Tree View' mode which can be activated when viewing an individual that has children which displays a descendant tree for the chosen person. Individuals can be selected from that tree rather than using the separate list boxes on the right side of the screen. When in census mode, check boxes are displayed next to the people in the tree and multiple people can be ticked and added to the census entry with the click of a button. There is a new setting on the options screen that can be used to choose where on the main screen the Tree View panel will be displayed.
- In the 1921 England/Wales census (and other templates where age is given in years and months), Ancestral Sources will now allow an age in years with 0 months to be recorded. Ages with 0 months can now be suggested and also used to more accurately predict a birth date when creating birth facts. Thanks to Lorna Craig for suggesting this.
- There is now a facility to paste an image from the clipboard, or an image file into the Image Viewer as an alternative to selecting an image in a file. This was a request made by an attendee during an Ancestral Sources demonstration to the FH7 Beginners Zoom group in December 2022.
- There is now a new autotext key word for individuals SN_ORIGINAL. This can be used where the maiden name of a woman needs to be displayed on a death or burial record and the Use last married name for deceased female option is selected. SN_ORIGINAL returns the same result as SN if the Use last married name option is not being used. This was added following a query from Chris Read and also John Elvin.
- Two additional options requested by John Rosser have been added to the marriage type drop-down: By Publication and By Declaration
- If any repositories are bookmarked in Family Historian then the repositories dialogue in Ancestral Sources will display a bookmarks check box to allow a choice from a reduced list of repositories. This was requested by John Rosser.
- There is now a filter that can be used with 'Add Images to Existing Source' that allows either a source ID or part of the source title to be searched for. This was requested by John Elvin and John Morrison
- Text pasted into plain text source or note text with just a line feed without carriage return appeared concatenated on a single line. AS will now insert carriage returns in these circumstances.
- Updated various census templates to ensure that the relationship list was consistent and includes Boarder as requested by John Hanson.
- There were a couple of reports of error messages when using CTRL+C or CTRL+X in the census grid. I've not been able to reproduce this, but I've added in some code that might stop these appearing.
- Fixed an error that occurred when trying to save using the 'add images to existing sources' feature. Thanks to Paula Moulton for reporting this.
- Short titles will no longer be recorded if templated sources are used.
- The births and deaths dialog for non-census sources didn't always resize correctly when higher Windows scaling was used. This was reported by Graham (gsward) and Teresa Eckford on the FHUG forums and should now work correctly.
- The ctrl+i shortcut to turn on italics wasn't working correctly when editing rich-text but is now.
- John Hanson pointed out that the ctrl+right/left cursor key shortcuts weren't working when editing rich-text. These should now behave as expected.
- Fixed an issue with the Add Individual option on the rich-text toolbar where instead of showing the spouse parents for a marriage entry it showed other individuals.
- Fixed a major problem introduced in v7.6.5 that stopped baptisms and births (and perhaps other types) being created. Thanks to Neil Grantham for reporting this.
- Fixed some problems with the 'Add Images to Existing Source' feature of AS reported by John Elvin. The {SOURCETYPE} should now work when used in image title templates and also text boxes on the 'Edit Image Title Elements' form should now enable correctly if the template tags are used in shortened formats.
- Since 2018, Windows has included a setting (off by default) to allow file names to be treated as case sensitive. AS will now take this possiblity into account when detecting whether a file is part of a project. Thanks to Kev Canning for reporting this.
- If the optional Windows setting to allow file names to be treated as case sensitive is being used on the folder that stores log files, Ancestral Sources will now handle the log file names correctly. Thanks to Kev Canning for reporting this problem.
- Updated the 1969-2007 and 2007- England/Wales Death Certificate auto-text templates to incorporate the SN_ORIGINAL keyword to correctly display the maiden name of a deceased woman and also to incorporate the name and occupation of the husband or wife of the deceased. This was based on a suggestion from John Elvin.
- Changed the names of the title templates as displayed on the Options screen based on suggestions from Colin McDonald.
- Richard Hyland reported a strange error message related to the image viewer. I don't know what caused this but have added some code so the error message shouldn't show again.
- An error could occur when saving a pasted image into a folder that already contained a file with the same specified name. The usual code to add a number on the end of the file name in these circumstances wasn't working correctly. This is now fixed - thanks to David Cooper for reporting this.
Download
Visit the Ancestral Sources v7.7 Download page on the Knowledge Base site.
See also the Ancestral Sources Help Online and the Ancestral Sources Knowledge Base pages.
Thank you to Simon Orde at Calico Pie for all his support and encouragement in producing Ancestral Sources, Jane and Helen at the FHUG for all their technical expertise in getting the AS download, help and knowledge base online and everyone who has helped to test, report issues and make suggestions for improvements.