* Ancestral Sources v7.1 Now Available

News and Announcements from the Family Historian World
Post Reply
User avatar
NickWalker
Megastar
Posts: 2597
Joined: 02 Jan 2004 17:39
Family Historian: V7
Location: Lancashire, UK
Contact:

Ancestral Sources v7.1 Now Available

Post by NickWalker »

Ancestral Source v7.1 includes some new features and bug fixes following the v7 major update released in December. It continues to support Family Historian 7, Family Historian 6 and earlier versions. In v7.1 there are new options to automatically generate hyperlinks to individuals (FH v7 only) and several other improvements to auto-text.

MainMarriageCompleteLinks.PNG
MainMarriageCompleteLinks.PNG (97.53 KiB) Viewed 6133 times

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.

MainIndividualsAdded.PNG
MainIndividualsAdded.PNG (125.33 KiB) Viewed 6133 times

What's New in Ancestral Sources v7.1
  • There is now a new option (replacing an ‘experimental’ census only option in 7.0.11 and 7.0.12) to include autotext hyperlinks to individuals in FH7 rich-text. If the option is switched on then census templates and associated individuals will automatically be displayed with hyperlinks. The default RTF auto-text templates have been modified to include hyperlink too by use of a new =LINKIND autotext function. Double click on a hyperlink which links to an individual to edit the display text if need be.
  • There is now a {DATE.DAY.ORD} auto-text template keyword that can be used to add an ordinal value after the day number, e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Chris Read requested this.
  • A new MEDIUM sub-tag has been added to PLACE and ADDRESS auto-text template keywords to display the part of the place or address up to the second comma. There is also a separate option (Census ‘Where Born’ Shorten) to do the same when creating the auto-text version of ‘Where born’ (place of birth) census columns. Lorna Craig requested this.
  • The census Year and Date will now automatically be retained following a save so there is no need to select a different census if you are entering several records from the same country/year. David Potter requested this.
  • There are now 3 new auto-text functions =CONTAINS, =STARTSWITH and =ENDSWITH that may be useful when combined with the =IF function. John Morrison requested the Contains function.
  • A new option has been added for use with census rich text auto-text called ‘Column Width Adjustment’. When the main census grid is converted to the auto-text equivalent (particularly when using the ‘Fit’ button) it may be that the auto-text grid columns are slightly too narrow or too wide. This can be mostly explained by a difference in font size between the AS interface and the rich text box. The Column Width Adjustment option specifies a percentage that can be used to increase or decrease the autotext census grid column widths. By default this has been set to 10% but you can adjust this as required.
  • There is now a new rich text census grid option to specify the way that the ‘Fit’ button changes the column width. It is now possible to specify that it resizes to the width of the widest cell but ignoring the width of the title/header. This was inspired by a suggestion from Mezentia on the forum.
  • Removed the Death Certificate 1969- (England/Wales) RTF template and replaced with two new templates (1969-2007 and 2007-) based on conversation on the FHUG forum with Gareth Howell and others where we concluded that two of the fields on the certificate swapped places around 2007.
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 v7.1 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 v7.1 (64 bit version)

Ancestral Sources v7.1 (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 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 helped to beta test Ancestral Sources.
Nick Walker
Ancestral Sources Developer

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