Suggestions for FTAnalyzer

I can only see Maps when on the Locations tab. There is an option from the Census tab?
Or is this a version you haven't released yet?

 

Not released yet.

 

Awesome.

Are you working on that timeline idea? A pin on the map for each of the census years for a person to show how they moved around over time? (As if you didn't have enough to do!)

 

I need to think about the presentation of it. For the majority of people in a tree you may not have every census. Plus a single individuals track is not necessarily that useful, especially if you don't have much data, or the map data isn't that accurate. I'd like to plot a time line/location plan on a map so for every life event and maybe draw a line from birth to death. However I think this might be more interesting for a whole family branch. So perhaps pick an individual and it draws lines from their life and their childrens' lives, grandchildren etc. As I suspect for many this will start small and fan out possibly worldwide.

However is that really useful? What would be more useful? I'm thinking a map with markers for all direct/blood relations perhaps colour coded by blue for male line and red/pink for female line back from an individual? Perhaps with directs highlighted. This would require geo-coding** all the locations in a file though and as that is a time consuming effort and is specifically limited by Google to 1 search a second for my file with 1300 locations that would take over 20 mins to geo-code. Thus this process you'd only want to do once and store the locations, that then requires saving data to the user's disk which poses potential issues depending on where they install the file (c:\program files\FTAnalyzer for instance would prohibit writing to disk on Vista/Win7).

So quite a few issues to work out, and what the most useful sort of display would be needs to be determined. Simply doing something you'd look at once and never again isn't likely to be worth the effort. So I'd rather do something that is genuinely interesting to run multiple times rather than being a one-off novelty.

** Geo-coding is the process of taking an address and turning it into a point on a map.

 

Version 1.5.2 now has the initial work to prepare a geo-coding file. However it takes a LOOOONNNG time to run limited to a couple of lookups a minute. My estimate of 20mins was about right for my file. I've not done anything about displaying locations over time yet I'd like suggestions however.

 

Hi Alexander,

On the Individuals tab, how about a column for each of the 3 Lost Cousin Census years, indicating that the person has an entry entered in that year?

1841 1881 1911
Tim No Yes Yes

 

It would need to be Yes/No/Not Applicable (perhaps with a dash). However this info is available from individual census year reports isn't it? Would seeing a box next to an individual really help? Perhaps a statistics page? eg: Ancestors likely to be alive on census 1841, ancestors entered, not enterered, percentage, then repeat for other years?

 

Apologies, I didn't make myself clear. What I was after was an indication that an individual had a Lost Cousins entry recorded or not.
So my question should read:
On the Individuals tab, how about a column for each of the 3 Lost Cousin Census years, indicating that the person has a Lost Cousins entry entered in that year?

​

1841 1881 1911​

Tim No Yes Yes

 

Done but with colour coding rather than yes/no. Download v1.5.3.0 to test please.

The colours have tooltips but are basically :

• Grey - Not alive at census date
• Red - No census data entered (ie: no CENS or RESI fact present)
• Yellow - Census data entered but no EVENt fact called LOSTCousins entered
• Green - Census data entered and not a Lost Cousins year or
• Green - Census data entered and Lost Cousins data entered.

The report should make it easy at a glance to see who you have entered but not yet found on a census and who has been found but not yet tagged as entered onto Lost Cousins website.
NB. by default it only lists direct ancestors, blood relatives and those married to directs or blood. Untick the box on the Lost Cousins tab before running the report if you want everybody in your file listed rather than just blood relatives.

 

Alexander
Just loaded the new version, but I have no colours
However I do love the tab for errors, I have 59 to look into, although some of those are for the same error

 

Alexander, downloaded ok, report is working really well. How easy is it now to see where you haven't found a census for a person or haven't added them to LostCousins. Great job.

Adrienne, just in case you haven't found the report yet, the new report is on the Lost Cousins tab, its the last button at the bottom of the list called "View Lost Cousins census Report".

 

Colours are for the report on the Lost Cousins tab, button at the bottom of that page.

 

Ah I did not look there. Will test again when I get home

 

I agree. However I did spot one small problem:

If the year of birth isn't known for a child, but the birthday is known, it gives an error (father/mother under 13 years). It doesn't do this where the birthday hasn't been entered.

 

Thanks for this report. To clarify if you have a birth fact with a date of say "Jul 23" then it shows an error of father/mother under 13 years? Is this regardless of any dates for parents?

I can see why this is probably giving a spurious error. I'm not sure if I tested that possibility or not, I'll check and apply a fix.

 

This was the only error listed even though there are many families in my tree where the year of birth of a parent and/or child is missing. As it's also the only one where I have a birthday without a year it seems likely that's the cause.

 

Yes a birthday without a year is parsing with default year of 1. A child born in year 1 is likely to be before the parent was 13!! However this is a false positive so I'll amend the code to treat this as a special case similar to unknown births.

I believe I've fixed this, it will appear in the next release. Thanks again for the report.

 

I was wondering if the report really needed some of those columns eg: Ahnentafel, gender and death date? If these are removed the report slims down a lot and makes it easier to see across the page.

 

Remove columns!!!! What???? No, please no

I was actually thinking that maybe you could add a column that was the number of marriages?

But, I concede to your point about there's a lot on the screen (and it takes a long time on my pc to load, you can see each line wipe across one at a time, does this happen to anyone else?), so how about you default those columns to hidden, with a little note somewhere to say that people can unhide these columns if they so wish?

Also, and not very important, there's a little label on the bottom left of the window that says "toolstripstatuslabel1"

 

The status strip at the bottom should have some text it doesn't so it has its default name. I've edited this to show the count of the number of people.