Gedcom Import - TO Legacy from Heredis

[Outspoken1]

Hello Fellow Genealogists:

I am working with a wonderful gentleman who is helping me with my French ancestry. He uses Heredis (I'm not sure if it is the Mac or Windows version) and I use Legacy (most current paid version). The Gedcom imports with some errors. For instance, the persons profession, Which in Heredis is after the surname and given name, ends up importing into the persons surname in Legacy.

I have read about creating a custom import 'profile (for lack of a better term)' in Legacy and understand what I need to do. However, I need to find the codes that both Legacy uses and Heredis uses for the various categories of data (for instance _BIR is birth, as well as _BIRT). Can anyone provide some guidance to find a list of these codes?

Once I figure this out, I will post the solution so someone else does not have to work through this problem!

Take care,
Outspoken1 (Sandy)

[Glen in Tinsel Knickers]

Hi Sandy

As you have discovered GED files can come in several versions (it isn't quite as standard as we are all led to believe).

There have also been revisions to GED files (v4, v5.5 etc) and the codes (also known as tags) have evolved over time. Early GED files only had 12 different tags, v5.5 now have 256, another complication is that the tags can be abbreviated or full as in the example you give for birth for instance.

If you can open the Heredis file in Word or another word processing prog you should be able to find out which version of the Heredis programme, which version of GED file is used as well as the character set, from there you might be able to find a list of tags used. You can actually edit the info via Word if needed but need the relevant tags used by Legacy (and it's a long winded job for a large file).

A list of abbreviated v5.5 tags can be found on the following link, they might not apply to Legacy (it's from an FTM help site) but it could be useful for reference
ABBR