Migrating facts from old version of FTM

[Guest]

I am looking for a migration path for a database created under an old version of FTM. In this version the class of facts which GEDCOM calls Attributes were improperly handled in that the value of the attribute was not separated from the location. For example I was forced to create Occupation facts that contained: "Farmer, lot 5 con 6, Township, County, State, Country". Loading the GEDCOM output from this release of FTM into Legacy 7, for example, the value of the attribute, in this example "Farmer" becomes part of the location. I imagine the same thing would happen with any current genealogy software.

I am interested in any suggestions. The only technique I can think of right now to perform this in an automated way is to save the database as a GEDCOM and then use an editor that supports regular expressions to change the structure of the GEDCOM records. Do any of the popular genealogy programs provide a more sophisticated approach?

[Glen in Tinsel Knickers]

The problems occur due to "tags" and "fields". There isn't a universal system across all the software platforms and an early programme cannot produce a file with all the latest tags.


See the wiki article with more information relating to tags and fields;

GEDCOM Troubleshooter - Family Tree Forum

[Lynda]

Not being familiar with FTM, I wasn't sure what you were saying. So I imported a gedcom that someone had sent me and during that import I got a pop-up as follows:



Did you get this when you did your import into Legacy?

Lynda

[jcobban]

Did you get this when you did your import into Legacy?

Lynda

Yes I got that dialog, because Legacy recognized that FTM was the creator of the GEDCOM. Since there are several hundred thousand facts in my database I could not take advantage of the option to be prompted for the action to take. I was hoping that there was some tool I could use to automatically take the text up to the first comma and put that in the description field, and the remainder in the location field.

This migration is complicated by the distinction between "attributes" and "events" in GEDCOM, a distinction which is ignored by most genealogy software. "Attributes" have a value and a location, whereas events only have a location. An occupation fact, for example, is an "Attribute" in GEDCOM because the value is the occupation, and the location is where that occupation is practiced, as opposed to a death "Event", which has only the location where the individual died. I cannot think of any way to perform this cleanup using a generic tool such as a text editor; it requires a program with an intimate knowledge of the structure of a GEDCOM.

[jtaubman]

It would not be difficult to write one. I did one for myself years ago, but I don't think it splits the text, just moves the field to the attribute.

[Lynda]

Well I wouldn't know how to edit a gedcom file, but when I want to do some mass editing in my Legacy database I use Access. I don't think that would do the trick here though, because you are wanting to split some information out to another field.

Have to run off to a meeting, will think about it some more later.

Lynda

Well here it is, later ... I can't think of a way of doing this that doesn't require a lot of manual intervention. Sorry. Hope someone else can help.

Lynda