If you've not used Ancestral Sources before then you may find the "Introduction to Ancestral Sources" video helpful. This is available on the Ancestral Sources Videos Knowledge Base page.
- MainCensusReadyToSave.PNG (163.38 KiB) Viewed 4561 times
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.
Census Source Conversion (new in v7.5)
Many of us have added hundreds of census source records in the past, perhaps with earlier versions of AS, and wish we'd been able to take advantage of the rich-text facilities that are now available in FH v7. There is now a new facility in Ancestral Sources to enable you to convert these old plain-text census transcriptions into rich-text. In addition, it is also possible to convert generic census sources into the FH v7 templated sources. If the plain-text transcriptions were formatted consistently, the conversion only takes a few seconds per source. For less structured transcriptions there are various tools available to make the conversion much easier. These processes are described in this video: Ancestral Sources - Census Source Conversion. Some of those who have used v7.5 have reported great success. One said: "I've converted about 1050 censuses with the new version. It took only about 3 hours and it took that long only because I was using the comma separator. I can only imagine how long this would have taken by hand".
What's new in Ancestral Sources v7.6?
- The Census Source Conversion screen can now also be used to convert existing rich-text source text that doesn’t have hyperlinked individuals into a version that does. This works by first converting the rich-text back into plain text and then taking it through the usual conversion routine. A few users requested this.
- Update 7.6.6 includes a 1921 census template, adapted from a template kindly supplied by Colin McDonald.
- There is now a new button and right-click context menu to insert a hyperlinked individual into rich-text.
- Web urls can now be pasted into rich-text source text and notes and should appear as hyperlinks. Double-click on the hyper-links to edit the URL and/or to change the display text.
- There is now a new Auto-text function =COMMAINDEX which will return a specified item from a comma separated list.
- This could be used to access specific parts of a place definition which is something that Chris Read requested.
- Added a FULL sub-tag to PLACE and ADDR tags to return the untidied versions of the place/address as the Autotext Place/Address Tidy option can remove commas which then produces unpredictable results when using the =COMMAINDEX function.
- Improved the ability for the census source conversion screen to recognise the name column, inspired by a question from Bill Henshaw.
- Using the Customise option to change the font or colour scheme caused some data to disappear on the main screen (in particular the data in the census grid). This is now fixed.
- Fixed an issue reported by Peter Rollin where an error appeared when loading AS without a default project and with the option to show Custom IDs
- If a hyper-linked individual was double-clicked with a cell selected an incorrect name was shown. This has now been fixed.
- Peter Rollin spotted that the {INDIVIDUAL.CUSTOMID} didn’t always show if included in the source title template. This is now fixed.
- Fixed an issue where more unusual characters didn’t always display correctly in rich text. Thanks to John Morrison for reporting this.
- If the Image Viewer option to “enter your own title” was selected by default it didn’t enable the associated text box. This was reported by David Cooper and is now fixed.
- Made some improvements to resolve an issue reported by David Cooper where emboldening selected text produced unexpected results.
- Colin McDonald reported that deleting rows from the rich-text table can sometimes produce strange results. I’m hoping this is now working correctly within the limitations of the rich-text control I’m forced to use.
- On the source conversion screen, if things go wrong when saving the file this should now be handled better. This change was inspired by a problem reported by John Morrison.
- The 1950 USA census now displays names in Surname Given Names order. Thanks to Margaret Lawrence for pointing out that this needed to be changed.
- Fixed an issue where text could disappear from a source note when changing to a rich-text autotext or plain-text autotext template depending on the rich-text option set. Thanks to Lorna Craig for reporting this.
- Fixed a problem that could lead to auto-text wrongly reporting the user had already edited the source text. Thanks to Colin Spencer for letting me know about this.
- Made a small improvement to the source conversion system to deal with double spaces at the start or end of text, based on an issue reported by Chris Read.
Download
Visit the Ancestral Sources v7.6 Download page on the Knowledge Base site.
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.
