Errors in gedcom from Legac.

[Ed McKie]

I had always thought that the gedcom system was infallible. Not so.
Have justed exported a gedcom from Legacy 7 to Brothers Keeper and ran the inconsistency report to find that several dates have been transferred
incorrectly. Used gedviewer to look at the gedcom and the errors are actually in there. Obviously as it is a fairly large database I cant check every entry.
Has anyone else ever come across this probvlem ?

cheers..Ed

[Sue Mackay]

I have always known that the gedcom system is FALLIBLE which is why I refuse to use it. It is the reason why there are so many trees on the internet with people getting married before they were born. Anyone who turns out to have a connection to my tree is welcome to information from my database, but they get it in a Wordpad descendancy chart and they have to check any information and type it in for themselves if they wish to add it to their tree.

[Ed McKie]

Ah well, as I said I thought that gedcoms were an actual transfer of the data as it is. Since my postI have been doing a bit more googling on the subject and find that after humpty dumpty years of using Legacy that there is something called "bad dates" which are not transferred correctly into a gedcom. I did not now that !! so my family file is riddled with errors which I did not know about. For instance sometime use btw or bet. that is a nono. cant use 9th !! cant put in 1851 census into a date field which my wife has done 500 time !!! Ok, you may say I should have know that, but I didnt, so now I am stuck with checking every entry before I can consider making another gedcom. Why do I want to make a gedcom ? well I want to create a CD for the great grandchildren, and as far as I can make out this needs a conversion to HTML to make a simply viewable CD.

And to make it worse it appears that not all bad dates are transferred incorrectly !

back to the drawing board.

chees..Ed

[bamagirl]

Hi, Ed. I feel your pain. In my real life I'm a database analyst and specialize in moving data between various programs.

I do not have the Legacy program myself, but in looking at their website I saw a reference to a search option under Miscellaneous Searches to find Bad Dates. This is proposed as a solution for someone who is importing Gedcom into Legacy, rather than exporting out, but it may help to clean your data before another export attempt. If this method does work, you may want to consider using it as a periodic maintenance task.

Either way, I wish you success. Let us know how it goes.
Barb

[Colin Moretti]

GEDCOM files are simply text (.txt) files with a .ged extension so you can edit it with a text editor like Wordpad; so, if all the errors are similar you could open in Wordpad and use the search and replace function to correct them. When you've edited make sure that you save the file with the .ged extension.

Colin

[bamagirl]

Colin, I did not (but ought to ) know this. Very useful.
Thanks,
Barb

[Ed McKie]

GEDCOM files are simply text (.txt) files with a .ged extension so you can edit it with a text editor like Wordpad; so, if all the errors are similar you could open in Wordpad and use the search and replace function to correct them. When you've edited make sure that you save the file with the .ged extension.

Colin

Thanks for the suggestion Colin, however this is a large family tree created over 20 years or so. At my age I dont think that can live long enough (or have the patience, you know what grumpy old men are like,to actually sit and compare the original file with the gedcom. Family history was so much easier in the olden days when you filled in family group sheets by hand and had loads of folders which stayed as you filled them in and were not at the mercy of electronics :-)

cheers..Ed

[Gododdin]

Anyone who turns out to have a connection to my tree is welcome to information from my database, but they get it in a Wordpad descendancy chart.

Is the Wordpad descendancy chart one you've made youself? Could you be so obliging as to post an example for enlightenment (of myself and anyone else unfortunately as dim)? Your comments on the shortcomings of gedcoms makes one reconsider the options available.
Regards,
Godo

[Sue Mackay]

Is the Wordpad descendancy chart one you've made youself? Could you be so obliging as to post an example for enlightenment (of myself and anyone else unfortunately as dim)? Your comments on the shortcomings of gedcoms makes one reconsider the options available.
Regards,
Godo

I am not a big fan of computer family tree programs (I have tried several) and prefer to keep paper and/or word processor files on my main ancestors, but I do have a Brothers Keeper database with basic BMD info. Even here I ditched the upgraded version in favour of retaining the simpler Brothers Keeper 5.2F. This can generate a simple descendancy chart, which saves as a .TXT file which can be e-mailed and opened in Wordpad or similar. All programs should have a facility to produce a printout of some kind of descendancy chart/family group sheet, which can be saved either as .TXT or PDF. A snippet of what BK produces is

1 John Worrell Chandler b. 7 Nov 1789 Margate, Kent d. 17 Feb 1864 Dover, Kent
m. Susan Elizabeth Devonshire b. 26 Aug 1793 Long Buckby, Northamptonshire d. 2 Jun 1871 Dover, Kent
2 John Chandler b. Ca 1813 Margate, Kent d. Aug 1858 Drowned in River Lea, London
m. Amelia Downie b. Ca 1819 Marseilles, France d. 12 Dec 1875 Norwood, Surrey
3 Edward Chandler b. 10 Jun 1838 Marylebone, London d. 1883 Lambeth, Surrey
m. 1872 Sarah Townsend b. Ca 1840 Beckingham, Kent
3 Edmund Chandler b. 25 Jun 1840 Dover, Kent
3 John Worrell Chandler b. 6 Sep 1842 Norwood, Surrey d. 4 Dec 1924 Sydenham, Kent
m. 14 Apr 1867 Walworth, Surrey Ellen Philbrook b. 21 Dec 1844 Woodham Walter, Essex d. 11 Oct 1932 Sydenham, Kent
4 Alfred George Chandler b. 26 Oct 1869 Sydenham, Kent d. 26 Jul 1872 Sydenham, Kent
4 Ernest Arthur Chandler b. 24 Jul 1871 Sydenham, Kent d. 30 Nov 1939 Dover, Kent

though the generations do indent more for ease of reading