* Mutiple issues with GedCom/USA census

[RandyP]

I've been trying out GedCom Census, and I've encountered several problems.

1. In the 1920 US Census, the enumerator very helpfully put down an age as 4 10/12, which is 4 years and 10 months old at the time of the enumeration.

The 10/12 is significant because it helps place the birth month accurately, but I cannot enter that into the file (and have to manually add the info, which is a pain when you have multiple entries to do).

Is this a limitation of the program?

2. Additional data for census entry.

In the 1920 US Census, there are other fields that contain important data that GedCom doesn't handle, such as birthplace and birthplace of parents. Are there any plans to add support for this, or do I have to manually edit the whole thing?

Thanks for your answers.

ID:4275

[NickWalker]

Firstly I should mention that Gedcom Census was really designed for UK census records and the support for USA, Canada and Ireland only really extended as far as adding their census years to the drop-down lists at the top.

Having said that the UK census records do have place of birth and this is supported.

The text boxes in the middle are for entering data which then get saved into census and occupation facts. The text box underneath is for entering a transcript of the census if you so wish (many people don't bother with this). There is an Auto button that will fill some of this in for you but it is fully expected that you will need to edit this and potentially add other columns. The place of birth of the person does get put into this text box based on the place of birth recorded in the birth event of each person. If the person doesn't have a birth event then Gedcom Census will ask you what their place of birth is recorded as in the census and will create the birth event too. If, however, the place of birth recorded in the birth event is different to the place of birth on this census then you would need to manually edit this in the source text box.

The age issue is a limitation (UK census records usually have an age in years or months or days but not a combination of these. Just enter the age as being 4 in Gedcom Census and then after saving it, edit the age in Family Historian.

The good news is that I've been developing an entirely new program to replace Gedcom Census which is going to be released in the next couple of months I hope. This does support all the various census columns and even includes a census template editor so you can specify new countries and census columns if they're not included. It also allows age to be recorded in years and months (or years, months and days).

Regards

Nick

[RandyP]

Okay, thanks, Nick.

I look forward to trying out the new version - it'd be handy to able to enter in all the data from the censii forms, rather than having to work it manually.

That being said, so far, it shaves a little work off the details, so thank you for developing this in the first place.

[NickWalker]

I would say in defence of Gedcom Census that even if you just use it to enter age, occupation, place, address, census reference and link an image it is considerably quicker that creating mulitple census events, occupation attributes and (sometimes) birth events into Family Historian. I think I could probably enter 2 if not 3 census households in Gedcom Census in the time it takes to do this for one entry in Family Historian.

[RandyP]

I quite agree, and that's how I'm using it. I can just turn on auto-cit afterwards and enter in the rest.