* Ancestral Sources v7.2 Now Available

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NickWalker
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Ancestral Sources v7.2 Now Available

Post by NickWalker »

Ancestral Source v7.2, released on 6th March 2021, 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 v7.2 reintroduces the ability to automatically generate flags for individuals linked to census and other source entries and includes facilities to add those flags to existing entries. There are various other improvements and some bug fixes.

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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.

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What's New in Ancestral Sources v7.2
  • Flag support has now been added back into Ancestral Sources for those who prefer to use flags rather than expressions in Family Historian. Flags can be allocated to different census types and years as well as baptisms, births, marriages, burials and deaths.
  • There is a new facility to apply flags to individuals who have existing census, baptisms, births, marriages, burials and deaths.
  • Added a new auto-text function WORDNUMORD: it is similar to the WORDNUM function but returns the ordinal value, e.g. twenty-first rather than twenty-one.
  • Have added in some support for Facts flagged as Rejected and Preferred. In some situations rejected facts will not be shown and preferred facts will be the default. This was inspired by comments from David Potter.
  • Made an improvement to the suggested marriage status on census records so that it should ignore marriages that are after the census date in question. This was inspired by a forum post by John Hanson.
  • Removed {REF} from rich-text auto-text templates for Death for consistency.
  • John Morrison pointed out that " characters had an unnecessary \ copied to the front of them in rich text source text generated by auto-text. This should now be fixed.
  • Following reload the rich-text source was displayed, even if a plain text source was used. It also turned off auto-text in rich-text source text. This has now been fixed.
  • Richard Hyland reported a display issue with 'just name' informants on the rich-text England/Wales birth certificate - I've now removed an unnecessary space from the template.
  • I made some changes to the residence tab for birth and baptism to speed up the synchronisation between places for those with multiple addresses. I also improved the time taken to populate the address drop-down lists. This was prompted by issues reported by John Morrison and Chris Read.
  • David Potter spotted an issue that must have been in Ancestral Sources since marriage sources were added in version 3 in 2012! If the spouse age or date of birth was recorded but the individual's age or date of birth wasn't recorded, the option to create birth events wasn't displayed. This is now fixed.
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 v7.2 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 v7.2 (64 bit version)

Ancestral Sources v7.2 (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 has helped to test, report issues and make suggestions for improvements.
Nick Walker
Ancestral Sources Developer

https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/ancestral-sources/
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lastejas
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Re: Ancestral Sources v7.2 Now Available

Post by lastejas »

Hi Nick,

Just a quick question. Is there anyway to find out which "Auto text templates" have been updated?

Maybe its an oversight on my part and I should have cloned your templates and renamed the clones and made my changes to them. Then when AS is updated can just update the default changes and compare with my versions.

As always what a fantastic job you do with AS.

Cheers

Rick
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NickWalker
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Re: Ancestral Sources v7.2 Now Available

Post by NickWalker »

Yes I know I could do better with this aspect of templates and I may well make some changes one day to improve this. If you just rename the templates you've edited then you won't need to worry about overwriting them.

I do generally try to report the changes to templates in the 'new features' list. I think the only change was this one: " issue with 'just name' informants on the rich-text England/Wales birth certificate - I've now removed an unnecessary space from the template.".

There were a lot of changes in v7 and v7.1 to the templates because I added all the Rich-text templates and made too many changes to document them all but I think things should generally settle down going forward.
Nick Walker
Ancestral Sources Developer

https://fhug.org.uk/kb/kb-article/ancestral-sources/
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lastejas
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Posts: 57
Joined: 25 Aug 2011 11:42
Family Historian: V7
Location: Spain
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Re: Ancestral Sources v7.2 Now Available

Post by lastejas »

Thanks Nick, it was only with the last update as I've only made changes to the Auto text templates since using AS on my working project. I will rename all the changed ones and work from there..
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