* FH platforms

[TMG_refugee]

I am a long time TMG user. Late 2014 I made a switch to Rootsmagic v7 after looking at Legacy, FTM, and Rootsmagic. I don't know how I missed FH.
Because of the reasons for the demise of TMG I look to do some due diligence before investing a lot of time and effort.

1. What development platform is used? TMG got hit by Microsoft dropping support for their development platform.
2. What data base is used to hold the data?
3. Since the owner of Calico Pie seems to be early sixties I wonder what the plans for the future of the company are?
Retirement, acquisition, etc.

I am looking at any reference I can get to see what the functionality of FH is. I will then download a copy of FH and give it a workout.

[tatewise]

1. FH uses no development platform other than the C compiler.
2. The external database is a GEDCOM text file, and internally is FH own C structures.
3. You will have to ask Calico Pie about their plans, but appear to be actively developing FH to increase market share.

Explore our Knowledge Base for all sorts of reference information, especially the Family Historian Documentation section that includes Help files and Getting The Most From Family Historian PDF book.

Plugins offer user written extensions to functionality.

Ancestral Sources is a free add-on that must not be overlooked.

I suspect many other TMG refugees will give their opinions about FH.

[TMG_refugee]

Thank you, that is exactly what I need to know.

Because it is written in C then they only need a C compiler of which there are several. The internal storage of data does preclude any external software accessing the data such as SQL tools. And this also answers my concern over item 3.

[tatewise]

To be more specific FH uses Microsoft Visual C++ 2010.

I hope the answers are positive and persuade you to investigate the FH 30-day Free Trial.

[jimlad68]

Just curious, so how does Lua fit into it all?

[davidm_uk]

As Mike said, the data base used to hold the data is a plain TEXT file with it's structure defined by the GEDCOM standard. Here's a short except from the sample project that comes with FH:

0 HEAD
1 SOUR FAMILY_HISTORIAN
2 VERS 6.0
2 NAME Family Historian
2 CORP Calico Pie Limited
1 FILE D:\_Data\Family Historian Projects\Family Historian Sample Project\Family Historian Sample Project.fh_data\Family Historian Sample Project.ged
1 GEDC
2 VERS 5.5
2 FORM LINEAGE-LINKED
1 CHAR UNICODE
1 _UID {13F463F0-5340-4056-AB3F-49972FE733CB}
1 _LIST Bookmarks
2 _IDS I1
1 _LIST Work in Progress
1 _LIST Key Individuals
2 _IDS I1,I2,I3,I4,I5,I6
1 _ROOT @I6@
0 @I1@ INDI
1 NAME Anthony Edward /Munro/
2 _USED Tony
2 SOUR @S2@
3 PAGE Page 79
3 QUAY 2
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 12 JAN 1922
2 PLAC Cheltenham, Gloucester, England
2 ADDR The Cottage Hospital, 15 Dalglish Lane, Cheltenham
2 SOUR @S2@
2 SOUR @S13@
2 NOTE Anthony weighed 8lbs and 3ozs at birth. He was 3 weeks early, born at 12.12am.
2 FAMC @F3@
1 BAPM
2 DATE JUN 1927
2 PLAC Cheltenham, Gloucester, England
2 ADDR The Priory Church, Tonley, Cheltenham
2 NOTE Anthony had 4 god-parents. Two of each sex. Apparently all 4 attended his baptism, but their names are not known.
1 RESI
2 DATE FROM 1927 TO MAY 1941
2 PLAC Cheltenham, Gloucester, England
2 ADDR 12 Sharps Lane, Cheltenham
2 NOTE 4 bedroom bungalow.
2 _SENT {date} {individual} lived {place}< at {address}>< with {role=resident}>, with his parents.
1 OCCU Gardener
2 DATE FROM 1940 TO 1940
2 SOUR @S19@
1 OCCU Soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment
2 DATE BET JAN 1941 AND 1945
2 NOTE Tony signed up as soon as he reached 18, and was involved in the D-day landings before going on to serve through France and Germany.
1 OCCU Landscape Gardener
2 DATE FROM 1945 TO 1967

Many people on here have used text editors to make simple search and replace type bulk edits, and more sophisticated things can be done via FH supported plugins. Of course by using the GEDCOM standard data interchange with other genealogy programs (and web sites) can be achieved, and Mike has produced a very comprehensive plugin to facilitate this.

[NickWalker]

The internal storage of data does preclude any external software accessing the data such as SQL tools.

Not really. The data is all held in GEDCOM text files and so is (generally) extremely well documented and easily manipulated by other software (such as my own Ancestral Sources which is used by hundreds of FH users). Obviously Family Historian holds that data in memory when it is executing and the format of those data structures isn't really relevant. FH does include the built in Lua language to allow users to create plug-ins so even if FH was to stop being produced it could continue to be kept alive for a while by plugins being developed (as well as external software such as Ancestral Sources).

[tatewise]

For full details of LUA see http://www.lua.org/home.html.

[DonF]

To TMG-Refugee - a lot of far more detailed answers to the questions you pose are available in the 'TMG Refugees' website and mailing list.
You can get access through the TMG-REFUGEES list admin, whose admin email is TMG-REFUGEES-admin@rootsweb.com
list address: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/inde ... UGEES.html
list website: https://sites.google.com/site/tmgrefugees

Contrary to the info above, FH does NOT store all information in its text (GEDCOM) file. Global sentence structures, for example, are stored in FH-proprietary files FH advertising makes much of its use of GEDCOM as a method of 'protecting' your data and making it easily transferable in the future, if ever necessary. These claims are spurious, as it uses many proprietary GEDCOM extensions which no other program will understand.
As a TMG user you should also be aware that although the 'direct import' from TMG is a reasonable attempt for basic data (certainly far better than RootsMagic's) there are still significant amounts of data that FH cannot handle and/or makes a hash of transferring. I have 21 open problems with Calico Pie that they still haven't addressed, for example. Let alone the things they don't do

Finally, I think TMG's 'demise' is over-stating the facts. Development of TMG has stopped, but the program has not died. It runs on more versions of Windows than most other programs (including FH) and has active user forums supplying meaningful support. Due to the inability of any other program on the market to match its capabilities, I'm staying with it - it works fine on Win10 and I see no reason to waste time falling back to inferior products.

[RSellens]

I think DonF is prehaps, clouding the response here about data storage......

All the data for people/families/events etc is stored in the GEDCOM file as mentioned by others in this post. Its only what i would call user preferences/customisations that are not store within the GEDCOM, which i think is correct for two reasons 1) they are not part of the GEDCOM standard and 2) relates to how individual software program's present/display the data.

With regards to the reference to proprietary GEDCOM extensions, yes the program does use some custom TAGS but in the way defined within the GEDCOM specifications. Whilst this does stop some programs being able to load the data into there own propritary formats, this is not a unique situation to FH. Also Tatewise had done some very good work in building a plug-in that allows translations of some of the custom events into the custom formats that other programs find more acceptable, which actually gives you more compatablity than a lot of other programs may enjoy for input.export.


Richard

[brianlummis]

Whilst I respect Don's opinion, I am a former TMG user who has made the change to FH. I know that there are/were many TMG users who never used the software to its full capabilities and I count myself among them. For us the change is less painful and I have found that it has given me the opportunity to look at my method of recording data that had evolved over a 20 year period.
My view is that all genealogy software has a different way of working whether it is the compiler, the database it uses or its take on the way GEDCOM is used. One thing that is certain is that TMG is never going to be revised or upgraded so there is the distinct possibility that at some time in the future a change to new software will have to be made. Maybe a good example in a different area is WordPerfect which dominated the word processing market in the 1980's, but who is using it now? So you have a choice - stay with TMG until the inevitable day comes or find another program - and FH seems to be the best alternative at the moment.
As I am not getting any younger I felt that the best time to change was now as there is always going to be a learning curve with new software and currently my brain is capable of making the move. Also to be considered is that the longer you stay with TMG, the more data you will be adding, and when you do decide to make the change there is likely to be more cleaning up whatever software you use.
I am more than happy that I have made the change whilst accepting that others may have different opinions.

[NickWalker]

Contrary to the info above, FH does NOT store all information in its text (GEDCOM) file. Global sentence structures, for example, are stored in FH-proprietary files FH advertising makes much of its use of GEDCOM as a method of 'protecting' your data and making it easily transferable in the future, if ever necessary. These claims are spurious, as it uses many proprietary GEDCOM extensions which no other program will understand.

This is muddying the waters really as I don't use the sentence structures, etc. personally and all these are really are options for how the data is reported, not for the storage of the family tree data. The actual family history data is stored in the GEDCOM text file. The extensions are also in GEDCOM format so easily supported by other software - my own AS software understands these extensions so your comment that 'no other program will understand' is clearly wrong.

When I moved from FTM over 10 years ago the format in which my data was stored was completely proprietary and so all I could do was export the data in the FTM version of GEDCOM and I lost some of the information in doing so. I know that if I ever move from Family Historian I won't have to lose any data as long as the application I move to has a file system that is documented. It will always be possible to produce software/plug-ins (if they don't exist already) to convert the data for me so I can use Family Historian safe in the knowledge that my data won't be lost if FH disappears.

I'm staying with it [TMG] - it works fine on Win10 and I see no reason to waste time falling back to inferior products.

Fair enough, that's the point really that I'm making about Family Historian: even if it stops being updated by Calico Pie we will be able to keep using it for many years and it has the added advantage of plug-ins and third-party software which can extend its functionality.

[TMG_refugee]

We will all need to evaluate whether we switch now or later. I chose to switch now and did so to Rootsmagic V7. While it was the best that I looked at it fell far short of the capabilities of TMG and FH, now as I look at FH. The comments about GEDCOM are valid since I lost data converting from TMG to RMG7. I also own a copy of Legacy8 and tried exporting from RMG7 to Legacy8 and the import dropped many pieces of data that RMG7 put into the GEDCOM file.

TMG was extremely robust in it's ability to customize data for output. So far I have only seen the videos and help files for FH but I have not seen any documentation on either sentence structures or output reports. In TMG we could for example split up the memo field into 10 discreet pieces and I assume that FH note field is similar to TMG memo field but cannot yet see if there is the ability to break up that field and individually address those pieces of notes in a sentence structure. We could also embed field names into the memo field and have them resolved whenever it was displayed or outputted. This plus the ability to format the text completely in TMG let me obtain a repeat-ability that so far no other product can match. The only post process that I needed to do in Word was to re-position the images.

I just saw in another post that there are functions that can be used. I may be very happy with FH if there is appropriate documentation on using or coding these functions.

With regard to a specific fact I have on many occasions the need to store a large amount of data. For example I have one individual who fought in the American Civil war and I know from military records and pension files that he took part in a particular battle. This fact falls flat unless I include some description about that battle that may be indirect or tangential to this person. How should I include that data? In the note field or can I generate an external document that gets included?

Are there any videos, help files or tutorials that will cover these issues before I download FH for evaluation?

P.S. I was a TMG user for 15 years and used many of the features that they offered. I guess now I am spoiled and want what I had with TMG, but I may need to make do with less.

[DonF]

I can answer some of these questions - FH does not understand TMG split memos - it brings the entire text (including the || splitting signs) across as a single Note. As far as I know, the only way to address this is to manually split them yourself into multiple Notes (which FH does allow) and then create a suitable sentence structure to address such multiple Notes. If you've used split Memos a lot, then you face a lot of work. If the Memo contains references to variables, then you're also in trouble. The FH sentence construction capability is very simplistic compared to TMG, and the import process makes no attempt to convert TMG sentences on either the local or global level - more work for you.

The global sentences are easy to find and change, but as I mentioned are not stored in the GEDCOM file - as far as I'm concerned they are also a major part of my genealogical 'data', even if others don't see it that way. But you'll also have to tailor them to your liking, within the FH constraints.

In terms of your military info, if you have custom tags to cover these events then they do come across and/or you can add your own FH custom events, but you will have to address the sentences for them as well. Your narratives (if they were Memos) should come across as FH Notes, but of course you also lose all the formatting capabilities of TMG like italic text, fonts, colours, etc

There is a variety of FH educational material - I'll let the FH experts guide you as to where to look.

Don F

[tatewise]

Alternatively, the 'Memos' could be split into labelled text all in one Note, which makes them more visible and manageable. Then the Sentence Template can use functions such as GetLabelledText() to refer to each one.

I have investigated many genealogical products, and there is virtually no way of migrating narrative sentence constructs from one to another. It is difficult enough to migrate the essential family tree data, which without GEDCOM would be almost impossible, except for a few special cases where there is an arrangement between certain products.

The documentation is summarised in how_to:family_historian_documentation|> Family Historian Documentation.
However, most of the details of new FH V6 features are in its Help pages.
Getting the Most From Family Historian 6 is reported to be published within the next few months.