Family Historian User Group

I’m happy this approach works in principle, so I’ll start using it for real and report back later how I get on.

First impressions playing with RootsMagic are quite positive. Its Ancestry integration works well, and it is actually easier to review Ancestry hints within RootsMagic rather than on the Ancestry site or via their iPad app as more relevant information is displayed on-screen at once. I reject all hin...

Thanks Mike. I find the main benefit of hints to be the more obscure references it can produce, so they are worth persevering with for that reason alone, not just the "obvious" gaps in census and BMD data that can be readily searched on other sites. I'll experiment with maintaining the sim...

Thanks Helen - I was afraid that would be the answer... :( A better technique might be to load a series of sub-trees, so the focus can be on individual branches rather than the scatter-gun of all records. I'm thinking perhaps one tree for each grandparent plus recent non-living family, so five in to...

I have uploaded a simplified copy of my FH tree to Ancestry to exploit their automatic hints (which despite the obvious limitations, do occasionally come up with genuinely new information as new record sets are released). I'm not clear about the best way of sustaining this in the future as my FH dat...

There is a variant of this that works well for me on a desktop PC that I built back in 2011 with a relatively small SSD system disk (C:\ drive) and large mechanical hard disk data drive (D:\). It takes slightly more initial setting up, but is then completely transparent in operation. My OneDrive fol...

Indeed - there are an infinite number of ways to do this. I prefer my image files to useful outside FH as well, so generally include sufficient information that it is easily found and unambiguous what it refers to, but if you only ever access them via FH citations, a minimalist approach has its bene...

Couple of other points to consider as well - Always use the original image alongside the transcript - commercial sites create their transcripts in parts of the world where labour is cheap, and the transcribers’ knowledge of UK geography can leave a lot to be desired! Names also get mashed up, partic...

Thanks again Mike - another useful function in FH to study and take on board...! I think I need to experiment to get the best presentation in reports, but it is certainly more logical with my use of Occupation as a single summary field to position it alongside other such fields and not mixed in amon...

PS - curiously, charts are not controlled, as the following shows -
Ideally, I'd put the occupation at the top of reports as well, but will settle for a consistent position of first item after birth/baptism.

Indeed - generally just noted in the text of the source citation, but any inconsistencies or other points to highlight are entered as Notes . Sorted now on display order, thanks. I think I confused myself before as I did not realise that the displayed order in the Facts tab does not change until you...

Must admit, I'm not a great fan of the duplication involved in separate Occupation facts for each census entry. My usual practice is to record census occupation in the Note field exactly as stated, and have a single (undated) Occupation fact for each person that provides an occupation summary ( e.g....

Yes, and confirmed that the same effect is seen with Individual Summary Reports.

Thanks gents, it works fine with this modification. I clearly don't understand Lua patterns fully, as they can contain literal characters as well as the various % specifiers, but that is a bit off topic so we'll save it for another day when I get back to writing my own code again (it's a dark evenin...

Mike, Thanks for this. If there is an existing plug-in that does exactly what I want, then that's the obvious way to go. However, I can't get it to work correctly. Purely for testing, these screenshots are from looking for any newline character anywhere in any long text field, and it is not finding ...

My understanding of OneDrive is that it works on the principle of “most recent change”. So if you have three copies of a file (one in the cloud, and two on different local systems), any change to one of these is pushed automatically to other copies. This holds for both file modifications and deletio...

Thanks Jane, I wasn’t familiar with junctions, so could be useful. It’s a pity that FH doesn’t permit the user to specify where program data are stored, as it seems an odd omission for what is otherwise a very flexible program. Another option could be a utility such as FreeFileSync to mirror the pro...

You can see the carriage returns indirectly. Select the relevant text entry box, and move the cursor to the end using the arrow keys, without pressing Enter/Return. If the cursor sits at the end of the last line of text, there is no trailing carriage return. If it sits at the start of a blank line a...

Hopefully others will not make the same mistakes as I did.... Visiting Suffolk recently, I took a day in the archives to search out some original Parish Registers as their on-line availability is relatively poor. Unlike some other record offices, they do not permit scanning to USB, so it was a case ...

When running a standard Family Group Sheet report, I was frequently seeing blank lines between source citations. Trial and error confirmed that these arose from lumped source citations that contained more than one line of text and a carriage return at the end of the last line. Much of my data was or...

According to the National Archives 1939 web page “The 1939 Register is a digital-only record: the original register books have been retained by the Health and Social Care Information Centre, now named NHS Digital, and are not held at The National Archives.” So probably in a basement in a Government ...

My aunt died in 2015 and she is listed ok, but not yet my mother-in-law, who died early last year. However, another aunt who died some years ago in Australia is still redacted. Guess it’s only deaths the UK authorities know about that are opened.

Looks like their own independent indexing. I picked one record at random (my father in north London), and the house number was recorded incorrectly! Usual caveat - take nothing on trust until you see the original document. I also prefer the way FMP present the citation data and extra context, so thi...

Agree - that’s why I differentiated between generic sources such as the census that are available in many locations and more specialist material that may only be available on one site. In that latter case you definitely need more details about where it comes from. For images, my practice is to renam...

Indeed - this forum provides plenty of evidence that copied files are the easier option for users who neither know nor care what is happening “under the hood”, but if you are familiar with folder/directory structures and working at the command line it is easily managed. I routinely use FH on two dif...