* Exporting witness info, addresses, and custom family facts

[KaileyH]

I’m pretty new to Family Historian but I love it already. I have tried several other programs and was always disappointed by their limitations. Family Historian’s learning curve intimidated me for a while, but once I got beyond that, I realized it was just what I was looking for.

I was hoping to clarify some things, though, before I add too many facts. I know from reading forums for other genealogy software that the use of witnesses/shared facts, addresses, and I believe custom family facts was discouraged because these things often did not translate well to other programs. Is this the case with Family Historian 7 as well?

It’s not a deal breaker for me. I just want to know so I can enter my data in the way that is least likely to create headaches for me later. Thanks for any info!

[ColeValleyGirl]

Hi, Kailey and welcome -- good to see you over here.

I'm going to leave this for Mike Tate to answer -- he's the group expert on exporting. (No pressure, Mike )

[tatewise]

I was hoping to clarify some things, though, before I add too many facts. I know from reading forums for other genealogy software that the use of witnesses/shared facts, addresses, and I believe custom family facts was discouraged because these things often did not translate well to other programs. Is this the case with Family Historian 7 as well?

Welcome to the FHUG Kailey.

FH V7 certainly supports all those features you mentioned.

Whether they export to other products varies greatly from product to product.
The features that are well-defined in the GEDCOM specification tend to be supported by most products.
Custom family facts should be supported the same as custom individual facts, but some products are not so good at supporting both events and attributes as defined by GEDCOM.
Although addresses are well-defined by GEDCOM some products do not support them and even place names have various kinds of support in different products.
Witnesses/shared facts are not defined by GEDCOM so are only supported by some products.

What matters is the purpose of exporting to another product. If it is only for creating certain reports or diagrams, or obtaining online 'hints' from such as Ancestry and FindMyPast, then omitting some details may not be crucial.

There is the Export Gedcom File plugin (not the File > Export > GEDCOM File... command) which tries to convert all the FH features to match the capabilities of many popular products.

However, if you really need to be able to faithfully export to another product then it is advisable to restrict your Project data to using only the FH features specified by GEDCOM. That is quite an extensive list and much greater than the three items you mentioned.

See the FHUG > Knowledge Base > GEDCOM Extension List for all such features for FH V6 which needs to be extended to include Research Notes and Templated Source Citations and Rich Text for FH V7.