FTM2014.1 import into Roots Magic 7

You may or may not know that Roots Magic now has the capability to Import a FTM2014 and earlier file, directly into Roots Magic.

HOWEVER: If you have the new patch from MacKiev, ( FTM2014.1) you may have an issue.

Don't Panic.

Do a File, Export and Select FTM2012

Here is a link to the Roots Magic Help Desk that will help you.

http://forums.rootsmagic.com/index.php?%2Ftopic%2F16409-ftm-20141-import-issue%2F


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Copyright © 20156by H R Worthington

FTM2014 to Roots Magic - Living People weren't included

How to include Living People in a GEDCOM file and other options that you marked as Private




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Copyright © 2015 by H R Worthington

How to View Media files in Roots Magic 7 (for FTM2014 Users)

There have been many questions on the Roots Magic Facebook Group, where Family Tree Maker users have not been able to find a Citation Media File that they had in FTM2014. Here is a short video to help you with that.


How to View Media files in Roots Magic 7 (for FTM2014 Users)



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Copyright © 2015 by H R Worthington

Blog Post on Hold - update

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I was not going to do further blogging about using a GEDCOM file to transfer this one file from FTM2014 to Legacy Family Tree 8 nor Roots Magic 6.

Blog Posts on Hold

But after the Ranting about how bad FTM2014 is, on Facebook, I am going to amend that. There are reasons, as I mentioned, because the transfer is via GEDCOM. However, there is some very good news in what FTM2014 does when exporting a GEDCOM file.

I have successfully transferred files from FTM2014 to both Legacy Family Tree 7.5, and Roots Magic 6. Each included links to the Media files on my hard drive. I have also been successful in sending a GEDCOM to a user of Roots Magic, and had the Media Folder of the FTM2014 file, in Dropbox, with the GEDCOM file. Everything, including the Media files were opened in Roots Magic 6 (as expected).

Trying to help a FTM2014 User, who is leaving FTM2014 for another program, I did an extra test this evening, just to make sure I remembered correctly from previous tests, specifically to Legacy Family Tree version 8, which has been recently released). I had done Version 7.5 earlier, so I wanted to just double check.

When the file was imported, there was a warning message that I was missing 56 Media files. WOW !!! that's a bummer. But wait ...... There is an Error Log from Legacy that I looked at, while Legacy was trying to find those 56 files. I was doing something else but Legacy still hadn't found those files after about 1/2 hour. What's up with that. They are ALL in one folder, can't be that hard.

So, I looked at that log or error message file again, a little closer, and I realize that they ALL were images from Find-A-Grave. In FTM2014, it had marked ALL of the Find-A-Grave images as PRIVATE. They aren't my pictures, so I do NOT want them to be online.

I thought that when I made that earlier blog post, that I had checked that I had the media files in Legacy, and I remembered correctly, so this error message concerned me. Not only did the links to those images make it, BUT in the GEDCOM there was some indication that those images should NOT be included in that GEDCOM. So, FTM2014 did what it should have, including marking those Private Media files is such a way that Legacy shouldn't and didn't find them.

Lesson Learned, The export worked as it should.

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Copyright © 2013 by H R Worthington

Blog Posts On Hold

To follow the lead of my friend Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings I had planned to export a GEDCOM file from FTM2014 and import them into Legacy Family Tree 8 and Roots Magic 6 (with the new patch). I have decided not to do so. I did the testing to both, but I ran into the age old GEDCOM issue.

The good news is that the data made it and both were able to locate my media files. However, the clean up in either program is not what I want to tackle right now. The Citation information made it over to both.

The issue(s) have to do with notes. Again, this isn't a new issue. For example, I have Person Notes and Research Notes. Two separate items for me. The Person Notes is for the Stories about that person. Oh, they made it, but the Research Notes were in the same part of the record, even though there are research notes for the person.

None of the Place Names were error free. Both Legacy and Roots Magic, for example, want to use United States, while FTM2014 uses USA. With 144 places, in the file I used. It is too much clean up.

I couldn't get the Mapping feature to work at all in Roots Magic 6. I must be missing something there, I even worked on the Roots Magic 6 Edit Place to use the Roots Magic 6 "standard". What was really interesting is that I was taken to the correct place on the BING Map just couldn't use the Mapping feature with the program, either by place or person.

I am choosing not to post my results because of the underlying technology (GEDCOM) for sharing our research. I guess if I hadn't spent so much time, carefully using Research Notes, Source Notes, and Fact Notes I might test further. If you don't use those features within FTM2014, the transfer is probably much better.

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Copyright © 2013 by H R Worthington

File Sharing and Brick Walls - "Y" in Death Fact

As a follow up to an earlier post, for the Clean Up of this GEDCOM file, Randy just posted his study of the issue. His genealogy software is Roots Magic 4, and he wanted to see what the cause of the "Y" in the Death Fact that I was seeing. He posted the following: The Strange "Y" in a Death Description Field in a RootsMagic 4 GEDCOM File

What is important about that blog post, is a comment from Roots Magic.

Wanting to test what Randy's theory is and the comment about the GEDCOM "spec", I ran a test but creating a Custom Report for Everyone in the File, with the report showing Birth fact information, and Death fact information, including the Death Description, where we were seeing the "Y".

The report shows that if there is a Birth and Death fact, with date, there will be no "Y". If there IS a Birth fact and no Death Date or Death Place, there will be a "Y" in the Death Description field.

 

 

Lesson Learned: Not every software vendor implements or interprets the GEDCOM standards the same way.


Copyright © 2011 by H R Worthington

File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 2 - Unknown Names

Continuing this series of File Sharing and Brick Walls - Part 1 - Import and wanting to help a colleague with a Brick Wall, the next step is to take a look at what is in this new file.

There are a couple of things that I want to do here:

• Unknown Names

• Place Name

• Citations

 I have a way of handling Unknown Names. I use 5 Underscores, if I don't know a name, be it a given name or a surname. [ _____ _____] for example. Before I started to look at how to do this, I considered the input and the output. What really caught my eye was on the output. People want to help "fill in the blanks". The 5 underscores, from my experience, has helped with this.

The Place Names Authority in Family Tree Maker has a purpose, mostly to get the data consistent but is very helpful when using the Place Workspace, and the Map feature. 

In my own file, some times it is obvious that a Place Name is a historical place name, like St. Mary's Parish, Maryland. In this case, I generally will double enter data. Once with the Historical Place name that would be reflected in a document (source) that I am looking at, but I may also include the "current" place name that the Place Name Authority of Family Tree Maker would suggest. I do want to use the Mapping feature. There are resources that may help over lay the Historical Place Name with the Current Place Name.

In this specific case, I am not sure that this will be an issue.

For Citations, I want to see what is and what is not documented AND I want to be able to have a Citation on Every FACT that was included in this imported file. That isn't a feature to do this in FTM2012, but I will show how I did that in this case.

Going to the People Workspace, I wanted to Set the Home Person for this project. I entered Knapp, William in the "Find" field, and right clicked on that name and selected Set As Home Person. The advantage of this is for quickly being able to see any relationship between anyone in the file and this Home Person.

Looking at the Index (Left Hand Panel), here are a few people with our Surnames. C. Mary, Clara, and two Elizabeth's. I will now change them to make their surname _____.

I selected Clara, and entered "_____" (without the quotes) after "Clara" and moved to the next field. Below is the result of that. The Pedigree shows her with the 5 underscores, the Family View, the wife's surname has the same underscores. This is just a reminder that so far, we don't have the surname for this person.

What I did notice on Clara, was the letter "Y" in the Death Fact for her. There isn't a Death Date, nor Place. The Description field would normally be filled in with a more specific location, like "At Home" or the name of a hospital, an address, or a little more detail for where the death took place. If it was a Burial Fact, the Description might be for the name of a Cemetery.
  

So, what is this "Y" all about?

Looking at Roots Magic 4, there is an option to make a person as "living" when death information is not present. Or said differently, no check mark would indicate that the person had died. Below is a screen capture from Roots Magic 4.

That lack of a Check Mark, in that GEDCOM file, shows up as "Y" in the Death Description filed on import into FTM2012. Running a Custom Report in FTM2012, there were 49 people in this file with this indication. For now, I won't clean this up. Only pointing out A reason to Look carefully at your data before merging a file into your own file.

All of the Unknown Surnames have been updated as seen by the Index on the Left.

Lesson Learned: How do YOU handle Unknown Names?


Copyright © 2011 by H R Worthington