The most recent version of Ancestral SourcesAncestral Sources is a utility written 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.   is v7.8 released in July 2023.  This includes a number of new features and enhancements as well as a small number of bug fixes. It continues to include full support for Family Historian v7 (as well as Family Historian v6 and earlier versions) including GedcomGEDCOM, an acronym for GEnealogical Data COMmunication, is a specification for exchanging genealogical data between different genealogy software. It is a file format that most genealogical programs and online trees recognise. 5.5.1, rich-text sources and source templates. The list of features and fixes included in v7.8 and previous version of Ancestral Sources can be seen below.

The  Ancestral Sources v7.8 download is available in both a 64-bit (recommended) and 32-bit version.

Version 7.8 (July 2023)

• When editing the fields of a source template that are not auto-completed, Ancestral Sources will now remember the previous value entered and gives the option to carry forward that previous value. This should save time when entering data using templated sourcesFamily Historian Version 7 introduced the ability to define sources using ‘Source Templates’ to aid precision and consistency in entering source-identifying information.  , particularly if a batch of records from the same source are being entered. A queryQuerying is a very powerful feature that allows you to specify and save criteria for identifying a set of records of a given record type. from Gary Gauthier prompted me to add this feature.
• There is now a toolbar button that allows the ‘Key Person’ to be selected for census recordsCensus records are national collections of population statistics. They usually record details about members of a household on a particular date, and are typically collected every ten years.. By default the key person is the individual in the first row of the table, but this can now be changed via a new Key Person toolbar button. The default census method 1 title template has also been changed to use the {KEYPERSON} tag rather than {OTHER} – this will only affect new users or anyone who resets their settings. Thanks to Peter Rollin for suggesting this.
• Ancestral Sources will now allow templated sources to be created for those who use Method 2 (lumper) sources. Various changes have been made to the user interface to accommodate this. For example the link to create a RepositoryA repository is a place (physical or online) where collections of original source data are stored and maintained. will now only be shown if a repository is referred to in the source template.
• There is now a new accents/diacritics feature that works in a similar way to the facility in Family Historian. Hold down a letter in a text box to reveal alternative accented versions. Up to 9 alternatives can be allocated to any letter key and some other keys. Accent settings can be imported from Family Historian if they have been customised there. Thanks to Gary Gauthier for suggesting this.
• When entering the birth place for a birth source, or place of death for a death source, there is now an option, set by default, to automatically duplicate the place and address to the residence for the parents or spouse (if applicable). Thanks to John Rosser for suggesting this.
• On the Autotext Template Editor screen the editor now uses colours to indicate key-words and functions. By default it uses the colours to help to distinguish functions that are “nested” within other functionsA ‘function’ is an expression which returns values based on computations. Typically, functions require data to be supplied to them as ‘parameters’. A function in Family Historian is similar to a ‘function’ as used in spreadsheet applications (such as MS. These can be controlled using a new configuration dialogue on the Autotext Template screen.
• The title bar for the main screen will now indicate whether it is the 64 bit or 32 bit version of Ancestral Sources that is running. This was inspired by a request from John Elvin.
• When recording death or burial entries, previously if the default ‘Suggest occupation’ setting was set, the occupation of the parents and spouse (if specified) were also suggested. ‘Suggest occupation’ now only applies to the deceased individual. There is a new option ‘Suggest occupation for others’ that controls whether the occupation is also suggested for parents or spouse. This is not set by default.
• Now includes a 1931 Canadian census template. This is a slightly modified version of a template produced and kindly shared by Teresa Eckford.
• Nationality columns in census entries will now display as drop-down lists rather than text boxes to take advantage of the auto-complete facility. This was suggested by Robin Dew.
• Added menu items with keyboard shortcuts to allow alternative methods of selecting repositories, editing source templates, editing source text. Added a CTRL + F option to set the focus on the Find Name text box. CTRL+T selects the Date field when using census sources. Added a new Keyboard Shortcuts help page. This work was inspired by discussions with Alan Medows.
• Tab pages, for all source types except Census, can now be selected using short-cut keys Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2, etc. Choosing a tab page will now focus the cursor on the first control in the tab.
• If Templated Sources are being used then the link to create a repository will no longer be shown on the main screen. This will only be available from the Source Template screen. This was to done to stop issues that could occur if a repository was added from the main screen even though the source template may not include a link to the repository.
• The Batch Flag Add screen wasn’t correctly handling changes to scaling but should do now. This issue was reported by Richard Andrews.
• Removed the ability to type into the zoom drop-down list on the Image Viewer form, because it didn’t really work anyway and could cause an error as reported by Alan Medows.
• Alan Medows also pointed out that AS would display an error if the columns of a census grid with records added had an additional column added in the Census Template Editor. This is now fixed.
• AS would generate an error if the Options screen was used when a projectA Project is a Windows folder, created by Family Historian, which contains all your Family Tree information recorded in Family Historian. Normally located in the Documents\Family Historian Projects folder. or standalone GEDCOM file wasn’t loaded. This is now fixed. Thanks to Gary Gauthier for reporting this.
• Fixed some errors that could occur if only a year was specified for a census.
• Made a small improvement to the way the baptism and birth placesAccording to GEDCOM, a Place should hold “The jurisdictional name of the place where the event took place…”   synchronise.
• Peter Rollin reported that the KEYPERSON.CUSTOMID tag was incorrectly returning the name of the person if the key person was a ‘person not in file’ in a census entry. This is now fixed – it will return no data in this scenario.
• Fixed an issue reported by John Morrison where some additional text was incorrectly added to census headings if the ‘Census: Blank line after titles’ option was being used.
• Made some further changes to the way the tab order works in AS – in particular the splitter controls no longer act as tab-stops. I’m hoping this won’t cause any issues to users but allowing these to act as tab stops caused inconsistency in tab order.
• Alan Medows pointed out that using the buttons to move a row up or down lost the changed text in a cell if it is in edit mode. This is now fixed.
• The Find Name and ID text boxes will now select any text in those boxes when they get the cursor focus to make it easier to clear them if necessary. Another Alan Medows suggestion.
• When saving a burial entry it was possible to enter an invalid death date and for the entry to be saved. This is now fixed.
• The event date and death date error indicators weren’t cleared if the entry was cleared, they are now. Thanks again to Alan Medows for reporting.
• Made some changes to census template editor to allow a date to be specified when the ‘Year or Description’ isn’t a year.

Version 7.7 (March 2023)

There is an Ancestral Sources You Tube video: What’s new in Ancestral Sources v7.7

• There is now a new ‘Tree View’ mode which can be activated when viewing an individual that has children which displays a descendant tree for the chosen person. Individuals can be selected from that tree rather than using the separate list boxes on the right side of the screen. When in census mode, check boxes are displayed next to the people in the tree and multiple people can be ticked and added to the census entry with the click of a button. There is a new setting on the options screen that can be used to choose where on the main screen the Tree View panel will be displayed.
• In the 1921 England/Wales census (and other templates where age is given in years and months), Ancestral Sources will now allow an age in years with 0 months to be recorded. Ages with 0 months can now be suggested and also used to more accurately predict a birth date when creating birth factsFacts are one of the key concepts at the heart of Family Historian; they are how you record the things that happened to, or described, each ancestor (Individual).. Thanks to Lorna Craig for suggesting this.
• There is now a facility to paste an image from the clipboard, or an image file into the Image Viewer as an alternative to selecting an image in a file. This was a request made by an attendee during an Ancestral Sources demonstration to the FH7 Beginners Zoom group in December 2022.
• There is now a new autotext key word for individuals SN_ORIGINAL. This can be used where the maiden name of a woman needs to be displayed on a death or burial record and the Use last married name for deceased female option is selected. SN_ORIGINAL returns the same result as SN if the Use last married name option is not being used. This was added following a query from Chris Read and also John Elvin.
• From minor update 7.7.3 onwards, Ancestral Sources will remember the chosen associated individual type. e.g. if WitnessesA Witness is somebody who played an important role in an event (or rarely, attribute) but were not a Principal, e.g. they could have been a bridesmaid at a wedding, rather than one of the individuals getting married. were chosen for marriages then this will be selected next time a marriage entry is created. This resolves a complaint from a few users frustrated that ‘Best Man’ was the usual default as it was first in the alphabet.
• Two additional options requested by John Rosser have been added to the marriage type drop-down: By Publication and By Declaration
• If any repositories are bookmarked in Family Historian then the repositories dialogue in Ancestral Sources will display a bookmarks check box to allow a choice from a reduced list of repositories. This was requested by John Rosser. From minor update v7.7.3 onwards, the status of the bookmarks check box will be remembered between entries.
• There is now a filter that can be used with ‘Add Images to Existing Source’ that allows either a source ID or part of the source title to be searched for. This was requested by John Elvin and John Morrison
• Text pasted into plain text source or note text with just a line feed without carriage return appeared concatenated on a single line. AS will now insert carriage returns in these circumstances.
• Updated various census templates to ensure that the relationship list was consistent and includes Boarder as requested by John Hanson.
• There were a couple of reports of error messages when using CTRL+C or CTRL+X in the census grid. I’ve not been able to reproduce this, but I’ve added in some code that might stop these appearing.
• Fixed an error that occurred when trying to save using the ‘add images to existing sources’ feature. Thanks to Paula Moulton for reporting this.
• By default source short titles will no longer be recorded if templated sources are used. Templated sources in Family Historian do not really use generic sourceFamily Historian 7 introduced the concept of ‘Templated Sources’ and renamed Version 6 (totally Gedcom compliant) sources as ‘Generic Sources’.   short titles and using the options to create short titles in Ancestral Sources can lead to some confusion. However, there is an option (off by default) to allow short titles to be used with templated sources.
• The births and deaths dialog for non-census sources didn’t always resize correctly when higher Windows scaling was used. This was reported by Graham (gsward) and Teresa Eckford on the FHUGThe Family Historian User Group is a group of user with wide-ranging experience, from newcomers to very experienced users, all of whom are very willing to shared their knowledge about the programme. forums and should now work correctly.
• The ctrl+i shortcut to turn on italics wasn’t working correctly when editing rich-text but is now.
• John Hanson pointed out that the ctrl+right/left cursor key shortcuts weren’t working when editing rich-text. These should now behave as expected.
• Fixed an issue with the Add Individual option on the rich-text toolbar where instead of showing the spouse parents for a marriage entry it showed other individuals.
• Fixed a major problem introduced in v7.6.5 that stopped baptisms and births (and perhaps other types) being created. Thanks to Neil Grantham for reporting this.
• Fixed some problems with the ‘Add Images to Existing Source’ feature of AS reported by John Elvin. The {SOURCETYPE} should now work when used in image title templates and also text boxes on the ‘Edit Image Title Elements’ form should now enable correctly if the template tags are used in shortened formats.
• Since 2018, Windows has included a setting (off by default) to allow file names to be treated as case sensitive. AS will now take this possiblity into account when detecting whether a file is part of a project. Thanks to Kev Canning for reporting this.
• If the optional Windows setting to allow file names to be treated as case sensitive is being used on the folder that stores log files, Ancestral Sources will now handle the log file names correctly. Thanks to Kev Canning for reporting this problem.
• Updated the 1969-2007 and 2007- England/Wales Death Certificate auto-text templates to incorporate the SN_ORIGINAL keyword to correctly display the maiden name of a deceased woman and also to incorporate the name and occupation of the husband or wife of the deceased. This was based on a suggestion from John Elvin.
• Changed the names of the title templates as displayed on the Options screen based on suggestions from Colin McDonald.
• Richard Hyland reported a strange error message related to the image viewer. I don’t know what caused this but have added some code so the error message shouldn’t show again.
• An error could occur when saving a pasted image into a folder that already contained a file with the same specified name. The usual code to add a number on the end of the file name in these circumstances wasn’t working correctly. This is now fixed – thanks to David Cooper for reporting this.
• Updated the Baptisms 1813- (England/Wales) RTF auto-text template to remove an incorrect carriage return if the associated individuals minister was selected (minor update v7.7.3 onwards).
• Resolved some issues with the local noteFamily Historian version 6 and below supports two types of Notes: Local notes (associated with a single person, record, or fact); and Shared Notes or Note Records, that can be linked to multiple records and/or facts. Version 7 introduced Research Notes. not working with ‘just name’ associated indviduals.
• Fixed some issues with RTF to Gedcom conversion in v7.7.2 that caused deleting columns not to work (as reported by Mike Shepherd). Each row of a table was being incorrectly recorded as a separate table.

Version 7.6 (November & December 2022)

• 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.

Version 7.5 (October 2022)

New Features and improvements

• There is a new facility to help to convert census sources created by earlier versions of Ancestral Sources using plain source text into rich text. It can also be used to convert generic census sources into templated sources. This will only work for users of Family Historian 7 or later.
• Added a new option for age columns in census templates to expect year and month of age to be specified. This option has been set for the 1921 England, Wales and Isle of Man census templates.
• When adding data to the census grid there is now a new toolbar and menu button that can be used to ‘fill down’ the data, in a similar way to Microsoft Excel. Simply highlight the first cell and then select down the column and click the fill down button and the data will be copied into each cell.
• When adding an image, on the Copy Image File dialogue there is an option for it to remember your response so that it doesn’t show again for the current project. This setting can be ‘turned off’ in the new ‘Project Settings’ screen. This was requested by Colin McDonald
• Colin McDonald requested a ‘Save & Close’ button on the Image Viewer which has now been added. The image viewer is designed to be kept open while adding an image and to help with transcription, but this option may be useful to those who choose not to use the Image Viewer screen for this purpose.
• Added a new ‘Fit to image width’ button to the Image Viewer and changed the increments for the zoom drop-down list.
• The source text setting ‘Blank line after titles’ can now also be used with rich text and not just plain autotext. This was requested by Colin McDonald.
• The ‘Project Computer References’ screen has now been replaced by a new ‘Project Settings’ screen which can be used to delete project specific settings more easily.
• I made a change to the main title in the autotext templates for baptisms after 1812 based on a suggestion from Richard Hyland.
• Improved the way the ‘keep focus’ works so it can focus on an individual who isn’t added to an entry.
• The image viewer will now hide the side panel if viewing an image that has already been added to this entry.
• If the image thumbnails or ‘Add/View Images’ are clicked on the main form when the image viewer is minimized, it will now be opened.
• Creating a hyperlink to individuals in source text will now be the default setting for new installations of AS.
• Changed the default setting for the source title name to be generated by Family Historian rather than Ancestral Sources when using templated sources.

Problems Fixed

• When adding a new child to parents, the surname wasn’t suggested if the parent selected was female. DJY reported this on the FHUG forums and the name should now be suggested when the parents are selected on the add child dialogue.
• I fixed a problem introduced in v7.4.4 where scrollbars were not displayed on the main screen source text box.
• Corrected a spelling mistake in the 1950 USA census template.
• Fixed a minor problem reported by Richard Andrews where adding a witness and then changing the case of their name wasn’t updated in the list box that displays the witnesses.
• Fixed an error that could occur when removing and then re-adding an individual to a census entry under certain circumstances. This was reported by David Cooper.
• Fixed a serious error reported by John Morrison that caused repository information to not always be saved.
• Fixed some scaling/resizing issues related to the rich text control.
• Fixed a typing mistake with a tooltip as reported by Neil Grantham
• Response was incorrectly spelt reponse on the image copy screen.
• Minimizing the image viewer now turns off ‘Always on Top’ to avoid some potential issues.
• Corrected a problem that can lead to the reload message box not being visible if the image viewer is set to ‘always on top’.
• If the reload message box appears when maximising a minimised main screen, the main screen will now open rather than staying minimised.

Version 7.4 (May 2022)

New Features

• There are now options to specify whether census columns with no data entered are included in the source text produced by Autotext. This can be set on a field-by-field basis in census templates or via a global option.
• There is now a new toolbar button and corresponding menu item to add an empty row to the census grid. This is to make it easier to enter details of people who don’t appear to be related to the family and don’t need to be added as individual recordsEvery person in your tree will have a single Individual Record, which holds all the information about that individual that you have entered.  You can view and edit Individual records in the Property Box Dialogue., e.g. lodgers. Those individuals can simply be entered directly into the grid to appear in the source text generated by Auto-text, but will not included as individual records in the family history file.
• Made a change to the installer that should allow AS to be installed on Windows running on Arm processors.

Problems Fixed

• The CustomID auto-text tag wasn’t working for census sources. This was reported by Peter Rollin and is now fixed.
• An issue crept into the 7.3.5 release which stopped multiple images being added without closing and re-opening the image window. This is fixed.
• Also fixed a recent issue that had appeared where the Keyword and Function buttons were not visible on the Auto Text Template Screen.
• Also fixed a display issue with the source/image template control on the options screen.
• Tool tips that appear when the mouse pointer hovers above various options will now remain on screen for longer to make them easier to read. This was requested by ChrisV on the FHUG forums.
• Made various improvements to the way that Ancestral Sources displays information on computers running at scaling other than 100%
• If you’ve manually edited the census source text generated by auto-text then you will no longer be warned that the ‘Fit’ button hasn’t been clicked (if you have this option selected). Thanks to David2416 on the FHUG forum for pointing out this unnecessary warning.
• Fixed an issue reported by David2416 on the FHUG forums where the dialog reporting a change to the source title could be asked multiple times.
• AS would crash if source text containing an individual list was copied into the source note and the link clicked on. I fixed this.
• An FHUG user Kenfig (Mike) reported an issue with colours changing if the last column was deleted. I think this has now been fixed.
• Fixed an issue reported by Andrew Braid, Richard Hyland and others where the thumbnail version of a linked image displays very faintly so that it can be very difficult or impossible to see. Thanks in particular to Richard and Andrew for helping me to track down the cause of this problem.
• Made some improvements to how the rich-text hyper-linked individuals are handled.

Version 7.3 (February to April 2022)

New Features

• 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.
• Added a census template for the 1950 USA Census, adapted from a template created and supplied by Bill Henshaw.
• 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 PieCalico Pie Limited is a UK software house, and the publishers of Family Historian. 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 built 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.
• 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.
• For those who make use of custom IDs for individuals, there is now a CustomID autotext keyword that can be used to display this. This was added following a conversation with ‘Little.auk’ on the FHUG forums.
• In census template generic columns it has always been possible to specify that the details get appended to the census or occupation fact local note. It is now also possible to do this for other column types.

Problems Fixed

• 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.
• MichaelM on the FHUG forums reported that following a reload the AS main form loses focus. This should now be fixed.
• Fixed an error that could occur when using autotext template functions on the title templates under Options.
• Tony Jones asked if AS could be updated to allow a quarter date to be entered with a lower case q as well as a capital Q. This has been implemented.
• The Donate to Ancestral Sources via Paypal link had stopped working and has now been updated.
• Fixed a problem in update v7.3.4 where the scroll bars didn’t always shown on the source and note text boxes. Thanks to Richard Hyland for reporting this.

Version 7.2 (March 2021)

New Features

• 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.
• I made some changes to the residence tab for birth and baptism to speed up the synchronisation between places for places with multiple addresses“The address structure should be formed as it would appear on a mailing label…”, according to GEDCOM; however, this is capable of a number of interpretations, and Address and Place are best considered together.. 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.
• I improved the way that hyper-linked individuals are recorded to ensure the ID numbers are recorded in sequential order in the GEDCOM file and that there are no gaps in the numbering.

Problems Fixed

• 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.
• 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.
• After saving flags in the batch flag assignment screen it would warn that the file wasn’t saved, even though it was! This is now fixed. Thanks to Peter Henderson for reporting this.
• I have fixed various issues with the way that less common characters are handled when editing rich source text. This was as a result of reports from John Morrison and Peter Collier related to £ sign and some accented characters.
• Fixed an issue reported by John Morrison where the auto text census grid didn’t always correctly display characters that should be ‘escaped’ in FH rich text (such as >).
• John Morrison pointed out that tabs were not handled correctly in rich source text and this issue should now be resolved.
• I fixed a spelling issue in the output from the WORDNUMORD function: ninth was misspelled as nineth.
• Colin McDonald reported a problem related to previewing a rich-text auto-text template in the editor screen. This is now fixed.

Version 7.1 (January 2021)

New Features

• There is now a new option (replacing an ‘experimental’ census only option in 7.0.11 and 7.0.12) to include autotext hyperlinks to individuals in FH7 rich-text. If the option is switched on then census templates and associated individuals will automatically be displayed with hyperlinks. The default RTF auto-text templates have been modified to include hyperlink too by use of a new =LINKIND autotext function. Double click on a hyperlink which links to an individual to edit the display text if need be.
• There is now a {DATE.DAY.ORD} auto-text template keyword that can be used to add an ordinal value after the day number, e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Chris Read requested this.
• A new MEDIUM sub-tag has been added to PLACE and ADDRESS auto-text template keywords to display the part of the place or address up to the second comma. There is also a separate option (Census ‘Where Born’ Shorten) to do the same when creating the auto-text version of ‘Where born’ (place of birth) census columns. Lorna Craig requested this.
• The census Year and Date will now automatically be retained following a save so there is no need to select a different census if you are entering several records from the same country/year. David Potter requested this.
• There are now 3 new auto-text functions =CONTAINS, =STARTSWITH and =ENDSWITH that may be useful when combined with the =IF function. John Morrison requested the Contains function.
• A new option has been added for use with census rich text auto-text called ‘Column Width Adjustment’. When the main census grid is converted to the auto-text equivalent (particularly when using the ‘Fit’ button) it may be that the auto-text grid columns are slightly too narrow or too wide. This can be mostly explained by a difference in font size between the AS interface and the rich text box. The Column Width Adjustment option specifies a percentage that can be used to increase or decrease the autotext census grid column widths. By default this has been set to 10% but you can adjust this as required.
• There is now a new rich text census grid option to specify the way that the ‘Fit’ button changes the column width. It is now possible to specify that it resizes to the width of the widest cell but ignoring the width of the title/header. This was inspired by a suggestion from Mezentia on the FHUG forum.
• Removed the Death Certificate 1969- (England/Wales) RTF template and replaced with two new templates (1969-2007 and 2007-) based on conversation on the FHUG forum with Gareth Howell and others where we concluded that two of the fields on the certificate swapped places around 2007.

Problems Fixed

• When Family Historian creates a templated source with a repository it creates its own bespoke link from the source to the repository, rather than using the standard GEDCOM repository link. AS 7.0 included an option (Duplicate Repository Link – off by default) to duplicate the repository link when using a templated source. Unfortunately this option was being ignored and the repository link was always duplicated when creating a templated source. This means that each templated source contains two links to the repository using the bespoke and standard links. I don’t believe this should cause any problems. However, this setting is now honoured. Users who want to continue to have both repository links created will need to tick this option. This issue came to light when I read a FHUG post by terryjacombs.
• Mezentia on the FHUG forums spotted that Census records (including electoral registers) with just a year specified (not a full census date) would miss out females from autotext. This is now fixed.
• Fixed an issue where font errors could cause AS to crash, particularly with Windows 7.
• Mike Tate pointed out that the options screen for Birth method 2 wrongly labelled the title template as ‘short’. This is now fixed.
• Fixed an odd error where choosing Employ Status having entered an occupation made the drop-down list display with the items in the list sorted alphabetically. David Potter reported this.
• Ron Chapman reported issues with the way the source template screen and editor window incorrectly displayed fields when font sizes were changed. This is now resolved I think.
• Brent Tapscott reported that the residence fact for individual mothers gained an unwanted ’cause’ field with the value of True! This was due entirely to a single comma missing from a line of programming code in v7 and is now fixed. These ’cause’ entries can be easily removed using a simple query in Family Historian – ask in the FHUG Ancestral Sources if required.
• Corrected a problem reported by Mike Sheppard where the per-census image paths were not always remembered.
• The drop-down list of addresses didn’t always show just the addresses that had previously been used with the selected place and showed some unrelated addresses. This only happened if FH v7 source templates were being used. David Potter reported this and it is now fixed.
• If the auto-text template keywords for {PLACE} and {ADDR} are used in source template fields they will no longer remove commas or generally tidy them up, even if the option to do so is set. Place and address fields are added to the place and address lists in Family Historian and therefore should not be shortened. These values were shortened in AS 7.0 and David Potter pointed out this problem to me.
• It looks like source notes were not saved in v7.0 if the ‘rich text’ option was on but ‘plain text’ auto-text template was used (the source text was saved correctly this only affected the source note). Apologies to anyone who may have been affected by this, but it was only reported to me just before the release of 7.1. Thanks to Margaret Lawrence for letting me know.
• Fixed a minor display issue reported by David Potter where place names containing amerpsands did not always display correctly (but saved correctly). Ampersands have special meaning in Windows – I fixed this in a few places but it wouldn’t surprise me if there are some other places where they are still displayed incorrectly.
• John Morrison pointed out that the {SYSTEM.DATE} auto-text keyword wasn’t working in the initial release of 7.1 (v7.1.1) and this is now fixed.

• Julian dual datesWhen an Event happened, or an Attrribute was true. (e.g. 10 Feb 1713/14) were not being handled correctly. This was due to a problem introduced in version 4.5 and not reported by anyone. It should now be fixed.
• There is now a new template tag {IMAGEINFO} available for use in image title templates. If this tag is used in an image template and a new image is selected to add to the entry, then there is an ‘Additional Information’ text box available. This can be used to specify extra text to appear in the multimediaWhen you add a picture, video, sound recording, document file etc into a Family Historian project, a Media record is created to represent that media item within the project; the Media record includes a link to the actual Media file. object’s title and also the file name (if the ‘rename file’ option is ticked). This could be used to distinguish between multiple images added to a source.
• If the image viewer was set to always be on top, a small number of dialogue forms would pop-up behind the image viewer. These should now appear correctly above the image viewer.
• Images in the image viewer can now be zoomed in and out by holding down Control and using the mouse scroll-wheel. This mimics standard behaviour in many other applications.
• On the image viewer, when more than one image is being linked, AS will now attempt to retain the same zoom level and positioning on each image so that the current view will be retained as you move between them.
• Robin Dew requested support for entry of Quarter Dates, e.g. Q3 1809. This should now be possible for all source types other than census.
• The About option under the help menu will now display if the version of AS being run is 32 bit or 64 bit.
• Updated the default method 1 and image title templates for Deaths to be consistent with the corresponding Birth title templates. Suggested by David Potter.
• Colin Spencer reported that the options to retain marriage status when entering multiple marriages didn’t work. Retaining the religionThe GEDCOM specification says that the Religion attribute should be used for the religious denomination to which a person is affiliated or for which a record applies. also had the same problem and this is now fixed.

(Download count: 1301)

• Added autotext keywords to allow repository details to be displayed. Joop on the FHUG forums suggested this.
• There are now options available for all source types to allow a ‘short title’ for a source to be entered and a short title template to be set up to automatically generate this. This was requested by a number of people over the years including Mervyn Ashby and BarbaraD.
• Glenn Cox requested keyboard shortcuts for adding spouse, child, etc. These are now available (see edit menu for details).
• When adding a new child to an individual, if they only have one spouse they are selected by default. This was suggested by Glenn Cox
• David Miller and others suggested having the ‘Add to entry’ ticked by default when adding a new parent, spouse, sibling or child and this is now implemented.
• Added the 1939 register as a census template. Although not strictly a census, it can be treated as a census for the purposes of data entry in Ancestral Sources.
• If the deceased flag for a parent is ticked it now automatically selects the individual to show they are included in the entry. This change was inspired by a post from Colin on the FHUG AS forum.
• When AS remembers the size of a form when it closes, it is no longer as strict about a form’s frame having to be within the boundaries of the screen(s).
• Ancestral Sources will now check for updates automatically every 7 days. Previously it was only possible to manually check using the option in the Help menu.

• William Benson spotted that ‘between dates’ were not displayed correctly. This problem has been in Ancestral Sources since the first version five years ago but is now fixed!
• Another problem which must have been in Ancestral Sources for a long time was spotted by Colin on the FHUG forum. When creating a new birth or death record the date and place of birth/death was always recorded even if the relevant boxes were unticked. This is now fixed.
• Fixed a typing mistake where niece was misspelled as neice in the informant drop-down list, reported via email from Teris.
• Steve Galloway reported that under particular circumstances birth entries which include marriage details of parents can cause a crash. This should now be fixed.
• Backing up AS options now includes any changes to the main form size. This was spotted due to an issue reported by Pentris on the FHUG forums and investigated by Mike Tate.
• AS would crash if particular non-specific regional locations were set: AS uses the location to try to determine if the default date format should be dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy. Keith Skipper reported this problem which should now be fixed.
• For census entries which include a birth date column (e.g. UK 1939), the dates are now displayed in title case rather than capitals to be more consistent with other date fields in Ancestral Sources. This inconsistency was reported by ‘capnkeith’ on the FHUG AS forum.
• Doug Byway reported an issue which must have been in AS since version 1, which could have meant that a cell currently being edited in the census grid was not saved. This has now been fixed.
• The option to retain parents after saving a baptism entry was broken by version 5. This is now available again for baptisms together with the option to retain parents for birth entries.
• Colin Spencer and Lorna Craig reported that the census birth entry screen could add a blank place to an individual who has an existing birth entry with a date but no place recorded and that this caused an exception error report in Family Historian. This error should now be fixed and I’ve tidied up the various option that are presented when adding birth details for a census record.
• Colin Spencer spotted another issue which hasn’t been reported before, despite it being there since version 1.1. When adding a new individual’s name if Enter was pressed rather than OK, the name wouldn’t be correctly formatted. This has now been resolved.

(Download count: 2459)

• Ancestral Sources now supports the entry of birth sources such as birth certificatesBirth Certificates are a formal record of the birth of a child, and typically include the date and place of birth together with information about the parents..
• There are now options to allow informants for deaths and births to be linked to the event using the Witness Roles introduced in Family Historian 6.
• There are now more colour options in the customise screen including some new themes.
• Witness roles created for linked individuals now include a source citation.
• There is now an option to retain any witnesses when replacing an existing fact.
• There is now an option, requested by Bill Henshaw, to always show the source type label next to the toolbar buttons, rather than just for the currently selected source type.

• Made an improvement to the Autotext template for scottish deaths to indicate widow/widower inspired by an FHUG question from Sheena.
• Corrected a warning message box which referred to Ancestral Sources v6 rather than Family Historian v6. SGauntlett on the FHUG forums reported this.
• Ancestral Sources would crash if an autotext template was entered using a function with more than one parameter if typed in manually rather than using the function list. This is now fixed.
• Colin Buckthorp pointed out that Ancestral Sources didn’t retain ‘last change notes’ when a record was updated. This is because the AS author didn’t realise that these notes even existed! This had never been reported in 11 years of Ancestral Sources and predecessor Gedcom Census and this indicates how little this feature is used. This is now fixed.
• The autotext template for Generic Baptism (Data Only) had some missing fields for keyperson and father. This is corrected.
• The Year in the autotext template for England/Wales and Scotland death certificatesDeath Certificates are a formal record of the death of a person, and typically include the date and place of death, the age or date of birth, and sometimes information about close relations. should have been registration year rather than year of death. Mervyn Ashby reported this.
• Sometimes GEDCOM files have @@xx@@ references that Family Historian ignores but Ancestral Sources didn’t. These will now be ignored by Ancestral Sources too.
• Colin Spencer reported a problem that caused census image paths to not always be retained. This is now fixed.
• Fixed incorrect tab-order on some screens and also some occasional issues with display when changing font.
• Fixed some help file errors.
• On Associated Individuals form I updated the caption for local note ‘in-file’ individuals to ‘Description’ for consistency. Mike Tate spotted this.

(Download count: 1042)

• Added support for new Family Historian 6 witness roles for associated individuals. Updated the associated individuals templates to match the standard witness types in Family Historian 6. This includes renaming ‘god-parents’ to ‘godparents’. By default there will be a warning if an associated individual using the new witness role appears to be being added to a GEDCOM file used with an earlier version of Family Historian. This warning message also gives the option to change these witness roles to local notes instead.
• There is now an extended birth support option to enter birthplace, age and date of birth fields for parents in baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials and for spouse in deaths and burials. This is enabled via an item on the View menu or a button on the toolbar. A new autotext keyword SYSTEM.EXTENDEDBIRTHSUPPORT can be used to detect if this feature is enabled.
• Added a new parameter option to ASSOCLIST for auto-text templates that use associated individual entries. One possible use of this is to record the minister/priest as an associated individual to take advantage of the new Family Historian 6 witness roles.
• Updated various auto-text templates to take advantage of ability to use witness roles in Family Historian 6.
• There are now 3 new functions available for Auto-text templates AND, OR, NOT. Although not strictly required they help to simplify and shorten some of the templates.
• It is now possible to drag and drop a file onto the image viewer as an alternative to selecting the file using the ‘Select File…’ button.
• When adding list items (e.g. relationships) to census templates there is now an option to duplicate the items from a similar column in another template. This was a good idea suggested by John Morrison.
• Added a new individual gender auto-text template sub-tag WIDOWWIDOWER.
• Prompted by Gerry Newnham, the auto-text template ‘Death Certificate 1837- (England/Wales)’ has been edited so that ‘wife of’ or ‘husband of’ shows Wife/Widow/Husband/Widower of as appropriate.
• When merging an occupation with an existing occupation, new local notes will now not be added if an existing identical local note already exists. This was requested by John Morrison
• Will Benson on the FHUG forums asked for a warning if no census place or address was specified. There will now be a warning if a place or address are not specified and this applies to all the source types.
• Added YEAR as a subtag of any dates as previously there was no way to just show the YEAR for registration dates. In addition I corrected some inconsistency between the way dates without sub-tags were displayed which also didn’t match what the help file suggested. Also all the date subtags are available for all date values including birth dates, death dates, registration dates, etc. Most of these date issues were pointed out by Peter Richmond
• Following a suggestion from John Morrison, when selecting an associated individual, ‘Just a name’ will now be the default selection as it is the likely choice in most cases.

• Ian Haynes reported that the citation certainty for burial entries couldn’t be set using the Ancestral Sources options screen. This is now fixed.
• When entering a log file, settings or backup path in options manually into the text box an unhandled error was given if the folder could not be created. Gerry Newnham reported this and it has now been fixed.
• I made a small change to correct a layout glitch when using a larger font on the Births/Death Events from Entry screen (Steve Bye reported this). Although there are still occasional layout errors immediately following a font change they seem to disappear once AS is restarted.
• John Morrison spotted a problem when saving a burial entry. If updating a death fact with just cause of death or age then these details were not saved. This is now fixed.
• Three links to the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum were broken (On the Welcome screen, help menu and in this help file). This was because the FHUG website was updated in 2013 and the location of these pages changed. These links have now been updated. Thanks to Andrew Weller on the FHUG forums for reporting this.
• Trevor Rix reported an issue with Link/Note records that has been present since the very first version of Ancestral Sources. The _ASID numbers in the GEDCOM didn’t always match correctly, when using method 2 where images linked to individuals or where there were links to existing images. This should be handled correctly now.
• Fixed a problem reported by Jan Murphy where a burial or death entry could not be created for an individual without spouse or parent family recordsFamily records store information about families, and links to all the Individual Records for those individuals who make up a family. You can view and edit Family records in the Property Box Dialogue..
• Ancestral Sources didn’t handle years with 2 digits correctly, particularly when running on a PC that wasn’t in the UK. This was reported by Megan Franklin who had an incorrect date in her file that caused AS to crash. This has now been fixed.
• Mervyn Ashby pointed out that there was an inconsistency between the default method 1 source title and image templates for marriage which included ‘address’ and baptisms and burials which didn’t. They all now include Address by default.
• The autotext templates for baptisms and burials for England and Wales after 1812 now include the reference ID which was wrongly missed off previously. Thanks to Mervyn Ashby for spotting this.

(Download count: 2593)

• Improved how some of the controls scale when a larger font or windows DPI is used. In particular the age dialogue had some major scaling issues. This was prompted by comments from gerrynuk and davidm_uk on the FHUG forums.
• The informant name was unticked initially until reset. This has now been fixed – ‘rodit’ on the FHUG forums reported this.
• ‘StevieSteve’ on the FHUG forums reported that under certain circumstances the parents residences and spouse residences were disabled when entering baptism or marriage records. This is now fixed.
• Updated the pre-1812 burial auto-text template to correct a formatting issue and to add occupation and residence information.
• The check-box for residence and birth place now updates autotext correctly.

(Download count: 226)

• This version introduces support for the entry of death and burial/cremation records.
• The Birth Events from Entry and Death Events from Entry screens have been given a slight redesign.
• When replacing an existing baptism, marriage, death, burial or cremation fact, there is now an option to retain any existing source citations, images or notes linked to that fact. This was inspired by a forum post by Anthony Pigott and others.
• Inspired by a comment from Irene Blackburn, when a ‘secondary fact’ (residence, occupation, religion, nationality and physical description) is to be created, Ancestral Sources will first check where an identical fact with same attributesEvents are things that happened to an Individual and Attributes are things that described them. (date, place, address, age) already exists and if so it will simply add a citation to that existing fact. This is particularly useful when entering both a burial and death fact for an individual where it is likely that the residence and occupation of the individual will be identical in both records and would therefore have resulted in duplicate residence and occupation facts being created.
• The associated individuals control and settings dialogue have had various user interface improvements and some inconsistent behaviour improved. Thanks to Mike Tate for pointing out some of the issues.
• Inspired by discussions with Bill Henshaw there is now a new general option ‘Autotext place/address tidy’ which will automatically remove unnecessary additional commas and spaces from places and addresses when displayed by autotext.
• It appears that the Cut/Copy/Paste toolbar buttons haven’t been working since version 1.1 and was only just spotted by ‘icapod999’ on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum. I hope this is now fixed.
• The 1940 US Census uses Wd rather than W or Wid as the abbreviated version of Widow and Ancestral Sources autotext didn’t recognise this when deciding whether to change the name of a female. It does now and thanks to John Morrisn for pointing this out.
• Fixed a really obscure bug caused by a silly typing mistake in my code, reported by Anthony Piggott on the FHUG forums. When adding an image to an existing source with ID of 4 it caused a strange error message to be displayed.
• Added a new registry key requested by Mike Tate to have Ancestral Sources save the path of the application in the registry. The value is called App Path and together with Version can now be found under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Ancestral Sources.
• Ancestral Sources will now read and write GEDCOM files that use unicode.
• The image viewer will now correctly display ampersands in file names.
• Steve Bye reported that under particular circumstances, the validation message for incorrect age entries would not disappear. Hopefully this has now been fixed.
• A user on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum (Anthias120) pointed out that the whole toolbar was disabled when a file wasn’t open when ideally the Open Project/File toolbar button should be available. This has now been corrected.
• When Ancestral Sources was opened without a default project the Project Computer References menu item should not have been visible. A user on the FHUG Ancestral Source forum (rabble) reported this and it is now fixed.
• When adding a new address to a place (e.g. individual’s residence), the address is now automatically available in the drop-down list of addresses on all the other place controls, e.g. birth place, spouse residence, etc. John Morrison requested this.
• If a warning that no repository has been entered is shown then pressing cancel will now cause the Repository selection form to be displayed. Similarly if the warning about images not being attached is shown the images form will be displayed after cancel is clicked. This suggestion was from John Morrison. I’ve also made sure that when cancel is clicked following any of the other warnings, the cursor will focus in the relevant field.
• Ancestral Sources produced an unhandled error message when it (naturally) failed to open a non-GEDCOM file rather than the expected ‘friendly’ error message that I expected to appear. Mike reported this and I’ve now fixed it.
• When changing source type or quitting Ancestral Sources, the “are you sure you want to do this without saving?” message will now appear if just about any change has been made to any of the various input fields. Previously only some of the fields were checked. Mike Tate suggested this improvement.
• There is now an option when creating baptisms to insist that an age qualifier is entered (this is not a default setting). Therefore entering an age at baptism of 3 would require 3y to be entered. This was requested by Steve Bye on the FHUG forums.
• Fixed an issue reported by Steve Bye where cut, copy and paste didn’t work with the marriage status and marriage type fields.

(Download count: 2603)

• When selecting an existing image on the Images form, there is now a filter textbox to help to narrow down the search for an image title. Thanks to John Morrison for suggesting this.
• Since version 3, the file paths where images are accessed have been remembered and recorded in a project options file. John Morrison pointed out that this didn’t work well if the project was accessed on more than one computer, as the file paths used are likely to differ. Ancestral Sources will now record these image paths for every computer that the project is used on. There is also a new screen to allow these settings to be removed for computers that are no longer being used.
• The Save button on the Associated Individuals panel has now been retitled to Add (changes to Update when editing). This was prompted by suggestions from a number of users on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum.

• Steve Bye reported a serious problem with Ancestral Sources, that has been there since v1.1. If the source entry type is changed while the file is loading it is possible for large numbers of sources to be lost. It shouldn’t have been possible to change source type during a file load and this should now not be possible.
• If a baptism entry was selected following a marriage entry, there was no option displayed to select the individual. Mike Tate reported this and it is now fixed.
• Fixed a problem reported by ‘Ed’ on the FHUG forums where the Age is never recorded in residence or occupation events for marriage and baptism records, even if the appropriate option to do so is selected.
• Made a few minor changes to the options screen to improve formatting errors.
• Chris Michael and Gerry Newnham both reported that the word repository was incorrectly spelled on a warning message box and also that the warning reported no repository was selected, even if a new repository was specified. Both of these have been fixed.
• An error was shown if a new individual was added with birth details and another individual had their name changed directly in the main panel. Thanks to Chris Michael for reporting this and it should now be fixed.
• The What’s New in this Version? link on the welcome page didn’t work – it does now.
• Steve Bye reported that following a census entry, the census reference id was retained after swapping to a baptism or marriage source . This has now been fixed.
• Jane Frances reported an error when checking for updates to Ancestral Sources. I’m unsure why this happened to her but this kind of error should now be handled more elegantly.

(Download count: 959)

• Added a new option requested by Bill Henshaw to not create an occupation fact if entered as ‘None’
• As requested by numerous people there is now a ‘deceased’ checkbox for parents in marriage and baptism records. This can be referred to in Autotext using a DECEASED sub key-word.
• Added a ‘Death Events from Entry’ screen to allow death facts to be created for parents who have been marked as deceased. Also added options related to this to the Options screen.
• There is an option to not record a parent’s occupation date if the individual is deceased.
• Altered the ‘Birth Events from Entry’ screen to help to distinguish it from the similar new death screen.
• Image keywords have now been made source specific. John Morrison suggested this.
• Suggested birth dates calculated from an age with a ‘before’ or ‘after’ qualifier, will now suggest a ‘before’ or ‘after’ date of birth. This was suggested by John Morrison.
• The image viewer can now be resized to be much smaller if necessary, with a scroll-bar displayed on the information panel if necessary. This should help those with low screen resolutions.

• Fixed an error where the AGE.LONG auto-text keyword returned the wrong result if the age included < (less than).
• The Generic Marriage (Data Only) template wrongly labelled the status fields as ‘age’. Gerry Newnham spotted this.
• Updated the auto-text templates for birth and marriage to include the DECEASED keywords. In particular improved the way the parent information is displayed in the template for scottish marriage certificatesMarriage Certificates are a civil record of the marriage of spouses, and typically include the date and place of marriage together with information about parents, witnesses and ministers or registrars involved in the service..
• Changing the name of a linked individual didn’t update autotext. Also for marriage entries, individuals who were added, then added as linked individuals and then removed from the file, didn’t get removed from the linked individuals list. These problems are now fixed.
• Following a suggestion from John Morrison, the marriage certificate and parish register1837- templates will now show ‘Full’ if age is entered as >21 and ‘Minor’ if <21. Any other ages show the age given

• A significant error was reported by Ian Haynes: an issue with the new ‘per-project’ settings meant that paths to images were not remembered correctly, particularly for different census years. I believe this is now fixed.
• Lorna Craig reported a bug that has now been fixed, where looking at a census template when a census entry is being viewed in auto-text with a married female, could cause an error message to be displayed.
• Elisabeth Briggs reported an error when the main screen was resized so that the repository title didn’t display.
• Fixed an error reported by Kristeen Simpkin that was related to the width of the image viewer screen and/or side panel on that screen. I’m not entirely sure why the error occurs but I believe I’ve stopped it from happening.
• Resolved an issue with baptisms where parents couldn’t be added to an existing family with children but no parents specified.
• Also fixed an issue where an error was displayed with the ‘retain data’ screen if only one parent was specified in the previous baptism entry.
• Although choosing font styles other than ‘regular’ (i.e. bold and/or italics) is not recommended, selecting them now works correctly. Mike Tate pointed out this problem.
• Fixed an error reported by John Morrison that occured when linking an existing image, followed by a new image to the same entry.
• Mike Tate reported that adding an individual and then removing them can cause an unexpected individual to be selected in the list afterwards. This has now been fixed.
• For associated individuals, custom events or attributes names no longer convert keywords that might have been accidentally added. This was suggested by Mike Tate.
• When editing associated individual types, the text boxes are now cleared if the method is changed. Again this followed a suggestion from Mike Tate.

(Download count: 1000)

• There is now a ‘Retain Data’ screen that optionally appears after an entry is saved. This allows the user to select particular fields to not be cleared so that they can be used in the next entry. e.g. date, place, repository
• Following a comment from John Morrison, the minimum width of the main form has now been reduced to 800 pixels.
• Gerry Newnham reported that in larger fonts the buttons were not visible on the ‘Add unrelated individuals’ screen. This is now fixed.
• Added other command-line arguments: -CLOSE which will close Ancestral Sources immediately following a successful file save, -SOURCE MARRIAGE and -SOURCE IMAGES to automatically open the Marriage or Edit Images screens. These are for use with the new plug-ins facility in Family Historian 5.

• Ancestral Sources now supports the entry of marriage sources using similar facilities to those available for baptisms.
• For marriage entries it is possible to enter ages for the married couple as > (older than) or < (less than) ages.
• Trying to create a baptism entry for an individual with parents other than those already linked in the file used to only be rejected just before saving. It is now not possible to select those parents in the first place.
• Fixed an issue reported a number of times when adding parents in baptim records and message ‘Individual … is already linked as a child in a family and therefore this entry can not be saved with the selected parent(s).’ was displayed.
• Clicking on the ID of a an individual in the tabbed area of Baptism or Marriage entries selects that individual in the All Individuals list.
• Changing the name of an individual directly in the baptism or marriage screen now correctly updates the name in the All Individuals list.

• Added USA 1940 census template – thanks to Bill Henshaw for emailing his template to me that I based this on.
• I renamed the census option ‘Auto Text Column Separator’ to ‘Grid Column Separator’. Have also made the ‘Other’ custom column separator able to accept more characters including a keyword {TAB} to represent the Tab character. Mike requested the ability to use multiple characters including Tab as separators.
• When creating a new individual for a census there is now an option to also automatically select them to add to the entry. This was requested by John Morrison.
• Corrected a minor issue with the options for census method 2 not always being enabled correctly, reported by Mike Tate.
• Bill Henshaw reported the Add Countries dialog didn’t accept carriage returns: it does now.
• Reset all settings no longer clears the census flag assignments, there is a separate option for that. Suggested by Mike Tate.
• Added a ‘deallocate’ button to the census date check form to allow the user the option to not change the date of particular census events. This was requested by Mike Tate.
• ‘Makfai’ on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum requested an option for each individual in a census entry to have a census event and residence event created. This was easy to achieve so I implemented it.

• There are now options available for baptism and marriages to not offer to create birth entries at all.
• When choosing not to change an existing birth event there is now an option to create a citation to indicate that the source supports the existing entry. This was requested by Bill Henshaw.
• Robin Jordan noticed that estimated, calculated and approximated dates didn’t display the year if the date included day, month and year. This is now fixed.
• Fixed a bug reported by John Morrison where a warning was wrongly displayed when entering a birth date as a year, in the same year as a baptism.
• Richard Sellens reported that when amending the birth details of a baptised individual an address field was added even if no address was specified. This is now fixed.

• The paths to media/image folders that Ancestral Sources remembers are now saved to a file within the project folder – assuming Family Historian Projects are being used. This will be very helpful to users of multiple projects as it allows Ancestral Sources to keep track of the correct image folders on a per-project basis. These paths are recorded as ‘relative’ paths where possible and therefore will also make it more convenient when editing the same project on multiple computers.
• The Image Viewer now includes facilities to enter keywords for the images added. Mike Tate requested this facility.
• Peter Richmond rightly complained that when he had the viewer window behind the main form and opened a dialogue such as Options or Configure, that after the dialogue closed the viewer window appeared in front of the main form. I’ve now fixed this.
• The image viewer now accepts Ctrl+ and Ctrl- (as well as + and – without ctrl as previously supported) to zoom in and out of the image. Geoff Browne suggested this.
• On the image viewer screen the ‘Same as Source Title’ option now shows the current source title. This was requested by Mike Tate.
• FHUG user ‘Stewart60’ reported that Family Historian 4 doesn’t always create a Media folder in a project and that Ancestral Sources does not create this folder if it doesn’t exist. Calico have acknowledged this as a bug to be fixed in version 5. They also gave the author of Ancestral Sources permission to create this folder if it doesn’t exist which it should now do.

• Added new functions =EQUALS and =EQUALSNOT to the Autotext template to allow for comparison of two values, to be used with the =IF function.
• Added a new Autotext keyword {ASSOCLIST.COMMA.AND} to display the list of individuals using with commas except before the last individual where and is used, e.g. A, B, C and D.
• Added new Autotext keywords {SYSTEM.VERSION}, {SYSTEM.DATE} and {SYSTEM.TRANSCRIBER} to allow auto-text templates to be modified to include who made the entry, the date and version of Ancestral Sources used. John Morrison suggested a keyword to show version and I added the others.
• Fixed an issue reported by Mike Tate where {ASSOCPERSON} wasn’t parsed.
• Fixed an error reported by Sue Herrington when Auto is pressed prior to selecting the first individual for a census entry.
• Tidied up the Baptism templates including correcting a mistake in the Generic baptism auto-text template where Residence Place incorrectly displayed the address instead (reported by Gerry Newnham) and where illegitimate was mis-spelled (reported by Ian Constable).
• Improved the way that unknown autotext keywords are handled. Inspired by an observation from Mike Tate.
• Auto-text had an issue where once a template was selected with auto ticked, it wasn’t possible to select another template. Mike Tate reported this and this has been fixed.
• Auto-text template now accepts the tab character.
• If an auto-text template has been selected then choosing ‘Autotext Template Editor’ will automatically select the current template to edit.
• If source text produced by autotext was edited by deleting or pasting text with ‘Auto’ ticked, Ancestral Sources didn’t spot the text had been edited and would wrongly update the autotext. John Morrison reported this and I hope it has now been fixed.

• There is now an option to use a custom attributeUsers of Family Historian can customize fact definitions, or create their own fact definitions to more closely match they way they want to work. (in addition to the various existing options) for associated individuals such witnesses and god-parents. This was actually 90% complete for Ancestral Sources v2.0 but I didn’t include it – Mike requested it so I finished the work on this.
• By default if using associated individual types recorded in the local note of the main event, the items added are separated onto separate lines. There is now an option to instead keep them on one line separated by commas. This was inspired by comments from Steve.
• The associated individuals form didn’t always enable the save button when modifying a template, it does now. Reported by Mike Tate.
• Made a change to the way that data is entered for associated individual types that use association structures to make it more consistent with the other methods. This was suggested by Mike Tate.
• If the option to edit associated individual types is selected from the ‘Further Info’ tab then the current association type will be automatically selected as the type to edit.

• If you’ve chosen to link a repository there is now an option to change your mind and not link it. This was suggested by Mike Tate.
• There is now an option available for each source type to warn the user if a repository hasn’t been selected before the record is saved. This was requested by Gerry Newnham.

• Ancestral Sources now correctly handles addresses that are split over multiple lines and there is an option to allow users to enter addresses in that way (although not recommended by the developer). This was suggested by Mike Tate.
• Fixed a bug when viewing a particular source type on the log viewer and scrolling through entries where the wrong source types were displayed.
• Removed the restriction for project files selected using the ‘Browse…’ button to need the folder that contains the .fh_proj file to have the same name as the .fh_proj file. This issue was reported by ‘donone’ on the FHUG Ancestral Sources forum.
• The drop-down list of addresses is now cleared if the place is changed or cleared and doesn’t match an existing place. Mike Tate suggested this.
• Corrected some issues with the help file reported by Lesley Lambourne and Mike Tate.
• Divine was mis-spelled in the template example – spotted by Gerry Newnham.

A number of other minor changes have been made that are not listed above, often as a side-effect of other improvements.

(Download count: 1559)

• New to this version, Ancestral Sources now supports the entry of baptism sources. This includes entry of Individual, father, mother, occupationsAn occupation is defined in the GEDCOM standard as: ‘The kind of activity that an individual does for a job, profession, or principal activity’., residence, etc. The same systems for linking to sources and images are now available for baptisms as well as censuses.
• You can now link sources to new or existing repositories. This has been requested by several users.
• New mechanism for recording ‘associated individuals’. i.e. other individuals such as god-parents who are connected to the event. There are options to either use custom events, local notes or GEDCOM association structure. This will be used in future source types to allow, for example, the recording of witnesses at weddings, informant of a death, etc.
• There is now an entirely new template system for recording auto-text for baptism and census sources. This will cater for some of the common formats for parish baptism records. More templates can be created by users or existing templates modified.
• There are numerous new keyword tags and sub-tags that can be used in auto-text templates as well as titles.
• Auto-text can now be set to automatically update as changes are made.
• When suggesting an occupation for an individual who already has multiple occupations recorded, the occupation closest to the event date will now be suggested.
• For method 2 users entering census records, when a source is selected and a year has not yet been selected then where possible Ancestral Sources will select a year that is referred to by the source title.
• The Census Flag Check failed to notice that wrongly allocated census flags needed to be removed if the individuals in question didn’t have any census facts. Thanks to Mike Tate for reporting this.
• Fixed a problem where Ancestral Sources would crash if there were no existing family records or source recordsSource: “where information was found”. This could be anything from an archive in a county records office, a book, or even a relative’s recorded recollection. Citing your Sources helps to show how you reached a particular conclusion about an Individual. in the file and an new individual was added. Reported by ‘PyreneesPirate’ on the FHUG forum.
• A problem was reported by Derek Arnold that the Image Viewer form was crashing sometimes with an error suggesting a problem with the size of the right-hand panel. I’m not entirely sure why this would happen but I’ve built in some safeguards to try to ensure it doesn’t occur again.
• Fixed a problem reported by Mike which will have been in Ancestral Sources since the beginning. When trying to link an existing file, that is in the project media folder and isn’t a supported file type, it wasn’t possible to view the file in the default viewer.
• The options to show warnings if no image, no source text and/or no reference are entered, have now been made source specific. E.g. you may wish to be warned if you don’t enter a census reference but not if you don’t enter a baptism reference. Robin P suggested this.
• The handling of font and font-size changes has been improved.
• Numerous minor changes have been made to the interface.
• As well as accepting the file name as the only command line argument, Ancestral Sources will now take 3 new command line arguments -FILE <Filepath> -SOURCE <Source> -IND <Individual ID>. The <Source> can be CENSUS or BAPTISM currently. Therefore it is possible to run Ancestral Sources using command line arguments to specify the file, source type and the individual to select initially. Jane requested this.

(Download count: 1403)

• There is now an entirely new facility to allow images to be added to existing census sources if using method 1 or citation/fact if using method 2.
• There are now options available to add whole person citations or name citations to all individuals referenced in the entry or to just new individuals created. Thanks to Peter Richmond, PatrickT and Bill Henshaw for suggesting this.
• It is now possible to change the name of any individual within Ancestral Sources. If the name citation option is selected then the name change will also get a citation when the source being created is saved. This was requested by a number of users.
• The new individuals added during the session (or name changes, etc.) can now be reviewed and the changes deleted/rolled-back. This was originally suggested by Peter Richmond.
• Image viewer form now has a ‘keep on top’ option.
• When an individual is added to a census entry, Ancestral Sources now warns if they already have an entry for the same year and not just if the same date. In addition the user is given the option to replace the existing census entry. This was requested by a number of users.
• The setup option to create a quicklaunch shortcut didn’t work for Windows 7 so I’ve now removed this if the setup is being run on Windows 7 (or later). Thanks to Dave Harris for reporting this.
• There is now an option for the auto source text facility to leave a blank line after the census column titles. This was requested by Steve Bye
• There is now a facility to make local notes created by generic census columns private by adding [..] brackets around the text. John Owen requested this.
• When displaying source titles for method 2 users, Ancestral Sources will now display census sources based on their short title if they don’t have a title. This issue was raised by Dave Harris.
• Once a flag association was set (using Flag Settings screen), it wasn’t possible to edit the flag associated (you had to delete and then add). Editing now works.
• In previous versions the list of sources which were considered to be census sources depending on the title including the word ‘Census’ or the source type being ‘Census’. It is now possible to specify the filter to be used to determine the kind of source. There is also a facility to specify this filter for other source types that Ancestral Sources will handle.
• If a new individual has been selected to be added to the entry and the user chooses to run a census flag check or date check then a warning is now displayed to tell the user that if changes are made then the file saved will include the newly added person/people.
• If an unsaved image was being viewed when census entry was saved this caused a confusing message to be displayed. This was reported by Dave Harris and is now fixed.
• Ancestral Sources remembers the positions of some of the windows so they appear in the same place next time the program runs. Dave Harris reported that this caused problems if a window was displayed on a second monitor and that monitor was later detached. If a windows setting causes it to be displayed off-screen the previous position will now not be used.
• On the image form the cursor keys now work correctly when entering a custom title. Dave Harris reported this problem.
• On the Image Select Media Folder form the cancel button didn’t work correctly (Dave Harris spotted this problem) but it does now.
• The size of the collapsible right-hand panel in the image form is now remembered. This was inspired by a comment from Dave Harris.
• When image types not directly supported were loaded, the correct message wasn’t displayed until the form was refreshed. It is now displayed immediately.
• When editing an existing column the short title will no longer update to reflect the long title. This was requested by Mike Tate.
• When the file is closed the file name is now cleared from the title bar of the main form. Reported by ‘GladToBeGrey’ on the FHUG forums.
• The ‘Current File is Default’ or ‘Current Project is Default’ menu item didn’t always show the correct wording. This is now fixed. Reported by ‘GladToBeGrey’ on the FHUG forums.
• David Dewick reported that when saving across a slow wireless connection he sometimes had Ancestral Sources report that the file needed to be reloaded. I’ve made some changes which will hopefully fix this issue.
• Robin Hill pointed out that when the census age cell gets focus the text isn’t selected, unlike the other cells. This is now fixed.
• Various users reported they occasionally got ‘DataGridView’ errors. With help from Debbie on the FHUG forums and Steve Bye I hope this problem is now fixed.
• The toolbar on the main screen no longer requires two clicks to click a button if the window is not the active window.
• The census template export and import now remember the previous folders used for these operations rather than defaulting to ‘my documents’. Thanks to Mike Tate for suggesting this fix.
• To make it easier to export census source text produced by the ‘Auto text’ feature, there is now an option to put quotes (inverted commas) around each column entry. Thanks to Robin Hill who suggested this.
• When a census grid cell is given focus (selected), all of the text is selected. Pressing F2 will now move the cursor to the end of the cell to allow the user to edit the text. Ctrl+Right and Ctrl+Left will move to start of next/previous word. Shift+Ctrl+Left/Right will do the same but with the text selected. Robin Hill requested this.
• Methods for date handling have been reworked to make them better able to deal with more unusual valid date formats, in particular Julian ‘double dates’.
• For dates entered as short dates (e.g. 11/2/1900) Ancestral Sources should correctly deduce whether the user’s computer is set to interpret this as being 11th Feb or 2nd Nov but there is also now an option for the user to set this.
• The various options and settings that are held in the Windows registry can now be backed up to and/or restored to a file. This should make it easier to move settings between computers or restore settings following a Windows re-install.
• The census templates for UK have been tidied up by Mike Tate who has kindly passed his changes to me. In particular: several of the long titles have been changed to more accurately reflect the wording on the original census forms. He has also added additional relationship options. Some of the ‘record if blank’ entries have been set to false (Employer/Worker/Own Account, Industry and number of children fields). The ‘born’ and ‘married?’ short-titles have been renamed to ‘Where born’ and ‘Condition’.
• Added KEYPERSON sub-tags to title templates to display the key person’s name in different formats other than the standard ‘Forenames Surname’ format offered by the existing KEYPERSON tag. This feature was inspired by a suggestion from Bill Henshaw and enhanced following further suggestions from Mike Tate.
• There is now the facility to clear/reset the current entry (i.e. clear all the text boxes, grid, images, etc.) without saving it. This was requested by Robin Hill.
• Fixed an error reported by Bill Henshaw when creating a new media folder.
• All generic census columns now use list-box cells rather than just text-box cells. This has the advantage of making it easier to enter the same data into multiple cells in a column. This was inspired by a suggestion from Andrew Braid
• If a selected image becomes unavailable (or available) after it is selected then it is possible for the thumbnail and the image itself to be different. Dave Harris spotted this. The thumbnail will now be updated whenever the image is re-displayed.
• The backup file names now incorporate the original GEDCOM file name. This will be more helpful to users who access multiple files with Ancestral Sources. Thanks to Mike Tate for suggesting this.

(Download count: 1820)

• First release of Ancestral Sources with support for creation of census entries.