FT Analyzer - could it possibly do...

I'd love to hear your suggestions of some analysis you'd like FT Analyzer to be able to do. So get your thinking caps on. Whether it be some feature that you'd like to see, or something partially there that you thought would work differently, or something that's present but not working properly...

Whatever it is let me know and we can add it to the list. The more ideas that are captured and thrown about the more useful we can make the program by our combined efforts.

Note I'm expecting end user comments, I don't expect you to have any technical knowledge at all. However as you will be experienced family history researchers you are likely to have the knowledge to suggest some useful thing the program might be able to do.

Let your imagination run wild, I will not be able to include things but even the most bizzare suggestions sometimes with a little discussion turn into something really useful.

 

It depends what you mean by "any geographical search". It wouldn't be possible for you to use a website search and for it to magically understand you meant the neighbouring area. However it is entirely possible to show you the parish boundaries and where your ancestors lived. Then you can go - "hmm perhaps I could try that parish records" in my searches.

Version 3.2.0.0 does this, ie: it shows you where your ancestors were and can display the parish map (for England and Wales) to give you an idea of which other parishes you should try.

 

Do you mean what the icons represent?

 

Unfortunately Anne that would cause a whole lot more problems than it fixes. FT Analyzer won't ever allow you to edit details in the program as instantly that means your family tree program and FT Analyzer would be out of sync, and you'd have to remember to make the changes in FT Analyzer back in your family tree program which would likely be a cause of confusion and problems. It is far better that you as a user are in full control of your own tree and you decide what to change and update. There will be times you update small amounts of data and want to refresh the GEDCOM there will be others you concentrate on finding new people and do a whole lot of updating before you look at refreshing the GEDCOM. It's flexible that way.

The other problem is that since there are so many different family tree programs and so many versions of each program out there I could never hope to keep up with the different requirements of each and how people want to store data. Specifically I'd not be able to write something that was able to push updates back to your family tree program automatically as there are too many variances and too much risk of something going wrong. It is far simpler for people to use what they are familiar and be in full control of the data in their family tree program.

The only things I can usefully see being stored with FTA is data that isn't usually held in a family tree program eg: the lat/long co-ordinate data is an example.

However all that said I have done some changes to assist, eg: the program now remembers the last 5 files you loaded so you can click on one of them to reload your file or you can click on reload to reload the currently loaded file if you've updated it.

 

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this.

 

It can already almost be done. From the file menu instead of selecting Open Gedcom file select Recent files and the one at the top of the list will be the last one you opened.

It actually has to reload the file as the data processed by the various classes is what is known as in memory constructs. It is actually better to reload the GEDCOM and setup the data than it would be to try to save the status of objects to disk and try to reload them as there is so much that could go wrong with that process not least of which is being out of step with your GEDCOM file and users wondering why the thing they changed and re-exported the GEDCOM hasn't changed.

So its possible to with a couple of clicks reload the last file used and get back to where you were but not exactly.

 

The free Parish Locator program will list all parishes within a given radius of one that you specify.

 

Have you tried the Maps feature in FTAnalyzer yet, that should help with this sort of issue.

 

That's no problem, but if you do get round to it then you can see all your people on a map either at a point in time or all people in that area.

 

I was (and still not finished) in a similar position to you. I changed my software to FTM so that I could record census data properly and use FTA to its fullest extent.

I started with my direct ancestors, and added a Lost Cousins fact for the year in question. Using the reports, I'm working through the rest, tidying up others bits of data (such as country) as I go.

Did you know you can copy your entries at the Lost Cousins website and paste them into Excel?

If you go to the search page at Lost Cousins, and select Name, Type or Household, and then click on the "Show more detail" which is below the edit button, this will present all your data in a new tab. You can then copy all this data using CTRL+A and then CTRL+C and then paste it in to Excel using CTRL+V.

Not sure this answers any of your issues but it has made me have a lightbulb moment.
I'm wondering if there is a way to mass load this copied data from Lost Cousins as "Lost Cousins facts" into a gedcom file, which you can then load into your software?

I'll raise this on the FTA website.