* Ancestral Sources v7 has been released

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NickWalker
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Ancestral Sources v7 has been released

Post by NickWalker »

Ancestral Source v7 is now available. This is a major update to support some of the significant new features in the excellent, newly released, Family Historian 7. It 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. It is important that you don't try to use earlier versions of Ancestral Sources with Family Historian 7 files as this may lead to data loss: FH 7 users must upgrade to Ancestral Sources v7.

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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
  • Ancestral Sources will now read and write Gedcom 5.5.1 produced by Family Historian v7 as well as Gedcom 5.5 created by earlier versions.
  • For users of Family Historian 7 or later, there is now extensive support for ‘rich text’ source text which now allows for tables, different fonts and font sizes and colour, bold, italics, etc. Ancestral Sources now includes a rich text editor which is similar to the editor in Family Historian v7.
  • There are extensive options for setting text styles and table column widths for rich text autotext templates
  • The rich text autotext for census records can use the short or long versions of column headings, columns widths can be easily adjusted using the main census grid and there is an autosize ‘fit’ option.
  • There is also support for creating templated sources in files created in Family Historian v7 or later. This works with ‘method 1’ sources. By default AS includes links to the relevant templates from the Essentials Collection, but all source templates are supported.
  • Census sources have been given a new ‘Type’ category so that Ancestral Sources can support sources which are similar to census such as Electoral Registers. The existing England and Wales 1939 Register which was previously classed as Census by Ancestral Sources is now categorised as type ‘Register’.
  • Earlier versions of Ancestral Sources lumped all census records for Scotland, Wales and England under ‘UK’. These have now been separated out to allow for the differences between the countries. AS now includes Scotland, Wales and Isle of Man templates that had previously been available as optional downloads on the FHUG site. more recent Canada and USA templates are also included.
  • Census templates are no longer required to specify a year or date. This allows, for example, a template to span a number of years.
  • It is now possible to specify whether a census template will record data in the default fact specified in AS options, or always in census events, or always in residence events or in a specified custom event.
  • If necessary, Ancestral Sources will now automatically rotate images based on the exif information recorded in the image file.
There are many other improvements and you can see a list of all the features in this and earlier versions of Ancestral Sources on the Knowledge Base Version History page.

Download

Visit the Ancestral Sources v7 Download page on the new Knowledge Base site or use the links below. Most users are likely to have a 64 bit version of Windows so if in doubt try installing the 64 bit version of Ancestral Sources unless you're sure you have a 32 bit operating system.

Ancestral Sources v7.0 (64 bit version)

Ancestral Sources v7.0 (32 bit version)

See also the Ancestral Sources Help Online and the new Ancestral Sources Knowledge Base pages (which are still being developed)

Thank you to Simon Orde at Calico Pie for all his support and encouragement in producing this new version of Ancestral Sources, Jane and Helen at the FHUG for all their technical expertise in getting the AS download, help and knowledge base online and to all the brilliant people who helped me to beta test this version of Ancestral Sources.
Nick Walker
Ancestral Sources Developer

https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/ancestral-sources/
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