Help please! Gedcom

[PeteW1959]

I have never downloaded from GR (I only ever upload) and have never run PAF (I use Family Historian). So to be able to help you further I have just done exactly that!

OK, you have your Gedcom in Pictures, and you have PAF installed.

Open PAF and you should get a box open up in the middle with 'Welcome to Personal Ancestral File' and 5 option buttons.

Click on 'Open' and a file navigation window will open.

About 2/3 of the way down that box there is 'Files of type:' with a drop down box.

Select 'GEDCOM (*.ged)'

Then in the file list navigate to your pictures folder and select the Gedcom

Click 'Open' and you will get a prompt asking you to create a new PAF file. You can give this the same name as your Gedcom (without the .ged)

You will then be asked about some preferences, set them now or just click OK and do it later.

Then comes an import progress screen, when that's finished, you're done!

[Guest]

thats well explained Pete, come on Dorothy you can do it

[Dubonnet lady]

You are both so helpful, thank you :0

Now : I appear to have got it on Hooray!

You will then be asked about some preferences, set them now or just click OK and do it later.

I didn't really understand what the choices meant.

Once finally opened a window has come up showing 22 Errors should I be worried about that?

Thank you both so very much for being so patient

One more thing: On the Search page I now have sooo many entries, all with different sizes and Applications, I think it was sheer chance that I clicked on the right one.
In addition to the Gedcom I recently downloaded which is late OHs - I have my own, which I downloaded back in 2005 - and it's just sat there doing nothing! But there's now 11 entries on that page :D
Is there anyway I can copy the page to show you?

[Guest]

you could email the gedcom to one of us or both ,and we can have a nosey

[PeteW1959]

I am not surprised that PAF found errors in your Gedcom, as GR's tree program is notorious for introducing errors.

It is fine if like me you build your tree locally and just upload every so often, but if you edit your tree online it can make a right hash of it, especially if you have a slightly complicated relationship such as cousins marrying or 2 sisters marrying 2 brothers. These aren't really that complicated or uncommon and it really ought to be able to deal with it, but can't.

I've lost count of the trees I've found with glaring errors in them only to be told by the owner that they knew the correct relationship, and it wasn't like that when they last looked!

I've pm'd you my email if you want me to look at your gedcom.

[Dubonnet lady]

Val and Pete - thanks again.

Do I just send the attachment from My Pictures to you?

[PeteW1959]

Yes, just attach the gedcom to an email.

[PeteW1959]

In case anyone else is reading this and wondered what happened about the errors, this is what I found.

First of all GR exported the gedcom with several blank lines at the end of some comment fields and PAF doesn't like this. Before exporting remove all 'white space' at the end of fields.

Second make sure your dates are properly formatted. They should all be in form of dd MON yyyy. (There are other formats to allow for before and after etc. but I won't complicate things here).

Thirdly make sure information is in the correct field on the person's info sheet. This gedcom had occupations in fields all over the place.

Make sure there are no odd characters in the name field. This gedcom had // in a name to indicate an alternative spelling; use the alias field instead.Also don't use N/A if you don't know a person's name (e.g. a married woman's maiden name). Gedcom uses / / as family name field separators and this just confuses the host program. Personally I indicate an unknown maiden name by using the husband's surname and putting () around it e.g. (JONES). This way in an alphabetical list all the unknown maiden names are at the top, reminding me I need to carry out further reseach, but it is obvious which branch they belong to.

Lastly, married cousins weren't handled very well, and each one appeared twice as two seperate people. I think that this was a problem that originated in GR, or it could have been the way they were entered originally, but either way it could lead to confusion. Once I had tidied it up, PAF seemed to cope reasonably well. This is one of the reasons I use Family Historian; it handles marriage of cousins and 2 brothers/2 sisters extremely well.

I fixed most of this by directly editing the .ged file, but DON'T DO THIS AT HOME unless you know what you are doing, you could easily corrupt your gedcom. I have years of experience handling raw data files of all kinds (see Data Wranglers thread in General Discussions), and did it with reference to the published Gedcom file specification.

[Dubonnet lady]

Thank you Pete and Val for all the help you've given with this, my (late) OH's Gedcom, which is being sent on to his family.

I know he was a novice to Geneaology when we met - as was I, so I hate to think what errors are going to be on mine :D But that's for another day.

[Guest]

glad your sorted Dorothy

[col48]

Just for the record, a GEDCOM file is just a text file which could be viewed in general programs like Word or Notepad (or even a spreadsheet program like Excel!). Not sure how Windows does this these days, but you can probably force it to open the file with a specific program by right-clicking on the file and choosing from a list under "Open with...". Watch it, though. It may make that your choice the default program to use with this kind of file unless you untick a box.

But if you do use a general program you will be confronted with many lines of information which it would be well-nigh impossible to get your head round once there are more than a few individuals in the tree. It looks like a legal document with all the verbs taken out, the nouns replaced with abbreviations and far too many lines! This is why a specialist program is recommended.

There's more about this in the Family Tree Forum Reference Library, currently at http://www.familytreeforum.com/conte...COMs-Explained