* Ancestral Sources v7.3 Released

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NickWalker
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Ancestral Sources v7.3 Released

Post by NickWalker »

Ancestral Source v7.3, released on 11th February 2022, includes the 1921 England and Wales census template, a few new features and bug fixes. It continues to support Family Historian 7, Family Historian 6 and earlier versions.

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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 v7.3
  • Templates for the 1921 census have been added for England, Wales and the Isle of Man. These were adapted from templates produced by Ancestral Sources user RS3100 (Phil) on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum.
  • New options to control source template title generation. For those who use the facilities in Ancestral Sources to generate templated sources for use in Family Historian v7 or later, there are new options that control how the source title is managed. The default option is that AS will generate a source title but that if any of the template fields are updated in Family Historian, the source title will be replaced with a title generated using the title format specified in the Family Historian template. Thanks to a feature added by Calico Pie at my request, there is now an option to ignore the title generated by Ancestral Sources and have Family Historian generate it's own source title as soon as the file is loaded in. There is also an option to set the source title generated by Ancestral Sources so that it will not be updated by Family Historian if the template fields are modified.
  • The auto-text templates that are built-in to Ancestral Sources are now always available and can not be over-written. This means there should be no concerns about new versions of AS overwriting existing customised auto-text templates, whilst allowing users to use the new templates if they wish. Any changes made to these bult in templates will generate a copy of the template which is referred to as a custom template. The autotext settings file in the user's document folder will only include custom templates, the built-in templates will only be stored in the Ancestral Sources installation folder.
    Any existing modified templates will be retained and flagged as custom templates.
  • If there is a custom and built-in autotext template with the same name and source type, then both versions will be available on the main screen and the auto-text template screen with the title showing [custom] or [built-in]. There are options to hide the built-in versions on the main screen if a custom version exists.
  • There are new options to export custom auto-text templates and import auto-text templates. This should make it easier for users to share their templates with others using similar functionality that have allowed census templates to be imported and exported for many years.
  • If the option is used to make private the local census or occupation notes for census sources, the privacy brackets will now be included on their own lines in the note. This should fix an issue reported by MichaelM on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum related to the sentence generator in FH 7.
  • The {DATE.DAY.ORD} autotext keyword was adding an unwanted space after the returned value. Colin McDonald reported this and it is now fixed.
  • David Potter spotted that repository names that include an ampersand were not displayed correctly on the main screen. This has been fixed.
  • Fixed an issue reported by John Morrison where under certain circumstances, hyper-linked individuals in rich text auto-text couldn't be double-clicked to edit them.
  • Richard Andrews reported that the census reference wasn't always cleared after changing source. This is now fixed.
  • Fixed a problem reported by Colin McDonald where deleting a rich-text table column could cause data in the previous column to be deleted too.
  • Colin McDonald spotted that if a different informant was selected, the informant description didn't update automatically. It should now do so unless it has been manually edited.
  • Stopped the context menu from appearing on the read-only auto-text rich-text preview.
  • Fixed a couple of minor issues with the help guide and Options tool-tips reported by Colin McDonald
  • The Retain Data popup wasn't showing the correct colour for the list box. Teresa Basinska Eckford reported this.
  • Corrected a tooltip error reported by Lorna Craig
  • Fixed an issue where starting AS for the first time didn't display the correct message if the user had previously modified census templates. This became apparent following discussions with Brent Tapscott and Colin McDonald - thanks!
  • The reference id and Other Information text boxes were retaining data when changing source and ignoring the user requirements on the Data Retention dialogue. Thanks to John Morrison and Richard Hyland for pointing this out.
  • In certain circumstances the Auto text button was showing the menu of templates even if there was only one template to choose. This was reported by Colin McDonald and 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 v7.3 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 v7.3 (64 bit version)

Ancestral Sources v7.3 (32 bit version)

See also the Ancestral Sources Help Online and the Ancestral Sources Knowledge Base pages.

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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