Family Historian User Group

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...

Interesting food for thought here. My approach as been to consider two separate but related questions - what detail do I need for myself or another researcher to check the information quoted, and what is simply convenient to have in some circumstances. For example, for things like census returns, pa...

Agree, a useful reminder that knowing how records were prepared is a vital part of understanding their reliability. Presented by a real enthusiast with the hint of more goodies to come from the GRO in the future. Recommended for all.

Indeed - I remember the first genealogy program that I used way back - a DOS program called Pedigree that was also created by an enthusiastic individual and supported by an active user group led by a small group of experts who helped novices and built complementary utilities. Sound familiar... :) ? ...

Thanks for the pointer - I knew there had to be a way of doing it somehow! Although in my defence, I'd spent a good bit of this evening going through the Queries material in the FH book, and Fact Queries are barely mentioned (or in the program help file to any real degree). Hence the WIKI I guess, t...

I'm struggling slightly with getting my head around the way FH queries treat multiple instances of events. For example, writing a query to list all non-blank census notes, along with details of the individual and census they relate to. Or perhaps a list of everyone recorded in a particular place (Jo...

Sorted - the following code fragment worked well on a test copy of my main FH database. It found about a dozen records where I had abbreviated "months" as "mo" or written out in full, and about half that number where the age was followed by other text ( e.g. , "age 59, Disab...

Thanks Mike, useful message that responsibility lies with the author.... This script will only be used a couple of times (once on each of my main FH projects) and the ages are generally recorded as either simple integers for years, or with 'd', 'w' or 'm' suffix as appropriate , so I think the metho...

FTM has no specific field for recording ages in event entries, so I have a huge number of ages recorded as NOTE s that I wish to convert to "proper" ages within FH . The format is very consistent, either just "age xxx" or "other comment, age xxx" , so a plug-in is the ...

Worth posting my latest code using Mike's excellent suggestions above. I've implemented the table slightly differently, with the year as the index and slightly more verbose assignments, but I find that easier to follow as a Lua novice. Interestingly, the alternative assignment trick to catch empty t...

Curious - simply a typo I hadn't spotted that didn't affect the end result on testing! I'll correct it before using on my live database though. I like the idea of a table - I'm generally allergic to long lists of conditionals such as this and there had to be a better way, but tables and functions ar...

Thanks Mike for the clear explanation. I'd been playing around with sets, but didn't get the syntax quite right! One criticism I would make of much of the patterns material I have read recently is that it gets too complicated too quickly. Lots of practice with simpler examples like this first! My fi...

Thanks Mike, it was a few days before I was able to sit down and have a go at this, but it turned out to be quite a good first learning example! I've now got a simple script that updates most of my media records perfectly, but fails where the title is more complex. For a general media title, "E...

This is timely, as I was looking at Lua for updating my media records. I have a large number of undated media records (images of source records) imported from FTM , and I want to add dates to aid reporting and sorting. My media titles are very structured, so I was thinking of two different scenarios...

This is quite an old thread now that has probably run its course, but for completion I include below my final crib sheet for my FTM - FH migration. It is slightly high level rather than detailed "how to" instructions, and parts will be specific to my recording style and use of Excel as a G...

One final refinement - I have split out the source splitting and general format tidying into two separate workbooks, as they perform different functions and the latter is purely optional (a neat and tidy import to FH rather than hundreds of comments in the log files). The source splitting is now com...

Indeed - as somebody who's only a couple of pages ahead of you, my impression so far is that FH is strong on GEDCOM compliance, flexibility and transparency of its data structure, but that adherence to GEDCOM comes at a cost, as GEDCOM is not a proper database language so does not handle duplication...

Thanks Mike - I was aware of the All tab of course, as it is clear on screen and frequently referred to in the documentation, but I still don't like the fact that the summary shows one note without alerting the user to the extra detail available there, and doesn't refresh after editing. So it is not...