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Transferring a large tree out of PAF

MaryT

MaryT

LostCousins Member
For years I have used PAF 4 for my trees, particularly my one-place study, which is now over 40,000 people.

I now have to face the inevitable, and need to transfer the file into something more recent. So, having read some of the earlier posts on the forum, I decided to give Legacy a try.

Managed to transfer the GEDCOM over OK - but it's produced 1,000s of error messages. Largely because, where PAF had start and end dates for some events, Legacy hasn't, and has taken the end dates and dumped them in the General Notes. And Legacy has also failed to translate the early double dates, so 2 Jan 1723/4 is now reading 2 Jan 1722/23-1724. Which is for hundreds of entries.

As far as I can see, I will have to change all these by hand??

I am also having some trouble with some of the Events, as the space allocated to being able to actually view the text of the source documents is very small.

Has anyone got any experience of
a) transfering such a large GEDCOM to another programme?
b) is there a programme out there that may manage to do the transfer with fewer errors?
c) know which programmes might be able to view source text that is longer than a one-liner easily?

Please note, my own personal tree is already up on Ancestry, and I HATE those little green leaves - they are almost inevitably wrong!
 
MaryT said:
b) is there a programme out there that may manage to do the transfer with fewer errors?
Click to expand...

Hello MaryT,
I was also a .paf user and have to say that I still prefer it to other FT software, however I'm using Roots Magic which I think is a good choice for .paf users. The latest RMG7 has even more features than the RMG6 which I am using.

Roots Magic claims to be the ideal choice for .paf users,but visit the site and maybe ask the questions there.You can begin with basic free version and see how it goes :)

I reckon most of us have used Ancestry's FTM (myself included as part of a subscription deal) and yes the 'hints' can be a bit shaky as well as helpful. I do find it very good in that multiple trees can be used, which I take advantage of to record research other than my own family history e.g. for friends.
 
Last edited:
emjay said:
, however I'm using Roots Magic which I think is a good choice for .paf users.
Click to expand...
I switched from PAF 5 to Roots Magic 6 after trying the free version first and feel it was a good choice. Although my tree was not as large as yours, MaryT, I did separate it into two trees and am finding them easy to work with.
 
Just been looking at Roots Magic Essentials, and it appears to have lost all the events attached to people - Census, Wills etc etc. I've just emailed Roots Magic to ask them if this is because it's Essentials - or not.

I wish I could divide the file, but I can't.
 
Roots Magic worked better with transfering via Gedcom, instead of just opening my PAF file. But there is a major show-stopper with the index - it only seems to list birth and death dates, and doesn't use christening dates or burial dates instead. So I end up, for example, with a list of 30 John Sheppards without any indication of dates at all. And 36 John Woods. As this is a one-place study, which covers three hundred years, there are a lot of duplicate names!

Unless I'm doing something wrong, it looks like back to the drawing board?
 
Family Historian is very good at importing Gedcoms from other programs - you might want to download the trial version and see how well it copes.
 
Mary - rather than change 40000 records by hand, you might consider learning a little about the GEDCOM format (you don't need to understand it all) and using an editor like Notepad++ to do a bulk change on your GEDCOM. I know this might sound daunting, but it will be a lot easier than manually doing it!
This is the spec - it is daunting but you don't need to understand it all. Alexander might know of a simpler guide somewhere - and of a better editor.
 
I'd echo Peter's suggestion of trying Family Historian. It's database format is entirely GEDCOM so it doesn't need to convert anything. Now this of course assumes that PAF didn't use any non standard GEDCOM entries or didn't allow you to enter non standard things like comments in date fields rather than a comment field.

Failing that you could as andymick suggests use a text editor to search and replace the text I use Textpad as it has lots of addins that do syntax highlighting. It's a great help to see colour coded GEDCOM files when trying to find stuff.
 
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