FTAnalyzer now searches census records

Looking good. The GenoPro duplicated a tag on the front page so I tided that up. An excellent start though good work, thanks.

 

Lol. I was trying to create another indentation under Creating Custom Facts, one for GenoPro, one for Ancestry etc.

But it looks like you've moved it to GenoPro, but the heading says this when you enter it DocumentationCreating Custom FactsGenoPro so its a bit confused.

I don't think you can do 3 indentations.

 

You could using HTML but not those wiki tags I don't think.

 

Ok, I'll try the HTML editor.

 

A GEDCOM file is based on facts, birth facts, marriage facts, death facts, occupation facts, residency facts, name facts, immigration facts, emigration facts, military service facts etc, and yes census facts.

On top of that you can record notes against each of those facts. In order for any automated system to understand your data it has to have structure. If all your core data for a census is in a note then sadly there isn't much any program can do. I am aware that several older family history programs only partially adhere to the GEDCOM standard and didn't even support things like census facts and got round this by encouraging users to cut n paste the census text into a note.

We are however investigating how to get round this. It may be that your census notes are indeed recorded in a standard manner and could be parsed (ie: read by the program and understood). I am aware that some programs like GenoPro for instance that don't normally record census facts can be tweaked to show the census entries as census facts. We are working to put together some notes on how to achieve this with the various programs out there.

In order to assist further therefore it would be useful if you could identify which program you use and what a typical census entry looks like. Perhaps include a small GEDCOM snippet showing an example family with a census record?

Hopefully there is some structure to the data ie: that all the census records are stored in a common format, if the format and layout is different a lot of the time then sadly there isn't a lot that I can do to try to make the program understand your notes. Images will be impossible to treat as even as humans we struggle to read a census enumerator's handwriting a computer program would have no chance of reading a census image consistently.

I'll try my best but no guarantees it depends on how consistent the data is.

 

Hmm FTM 2006 is entirely based on recording facts and fully supports entering census facts. FTM 2012 is actually a far superior product and I can fully understand that it's initially looks different and that's off putting however if you persevere especially if you have an Ancestry subscription you will find that the ability to merge data from Ancestry's records is amazingly good. The means of recording data between 2006 and 2012 isn't that different it has a popup box rather than the somewhat clunky interface 2006 had.

I've used FTM since 2004 and so suspect I fully understand the "leap" you are fearing between 2006 and 2012. However I'd thoroughly recommend making that leap. That said if all your census records aren't actually recorded as census data and simply refer to images etc then sadly there is nothing I can do to turn that into census facts.

The error message was that failed to complete or failed to compare? The birth registrations don't actually do anything useful anymore it was an attempt to print out a list in the format that a birth record appears on a Scottish birth registration form so that when going to the records office it was easier to make sure you'd captured all the information on the form. It never really worked properly though. I've tidied this up for the next version.

 

I think the report shows the other family members of the direct ancestors?

 

Alexander will let us know. Who knows, you may have discovered a new filter option?

 

I'll investigate and report back.

The problem is that the root person doesn't need to be set as someone born today. You could just as easily be concentrating on a single branch and have set the root person as someone born in the 1800s.

My own solution to the problem is I always use the extra GEDCOM date formats. So for instance for the born in late 1500s you could just record a birth as BEF 1600 rather than leaving it blank. Since the daughter was born 1600 you might even say BEF 1588 (assuming at least 12 at time of child born) (or whatever min age you want to use). The program would then know that the max death date was 1710 thus they couldn't be on a census.

Having lots of unknown dates means the program has not a lot to go on. I'd rather not add in extra dates to use in the program as that could confuse people showing a date that doesn't exist in their file.

 

Hmm its a bug. A rather annoying bug. The initial filter is on the family and so it picks up any family that meets the criteria. It then filters out individuals based on Age, Location but it should filter individuals based on everything you specified.

 

Bugs that can't be fixed are called Special Features

 

If you're Microsoft

 

Or Ancestry.

 

BEF still copes, if you get into the habit of remembering its any time before. I use 16 years and then rely on the data errors report to show me where I've then found earlier children.

I've re-written the whole filtering process using newer technology (Lambdas) this has dramatically simplified the code but was a steep learning curve. The downside is that there are a whole lot of things that were working that need fully testing. I may release a beta copy to some people to just check things are fine before releasing it as v2.1.0.0