Methods of Checking All My Ancestors have been added to Lost Cousins

[AdrienneQ]

Just started from V4 which suggested I download V5 having done this I then re-imported my file of 5339 individuals.
The results for both V4 and V5 were the same and did not take very long to import.

I would be interesting in identifying the "8 lone individuals as single families" and who makes up the 1414 families.
Would it be possible to add the family identifier (FamilyGed) to the Individuals Tab.
I have copied the records out of this Tab into Excel and this will allow me to clean up a lot of my data, I can see hour of fun in front of me

Some of my location data looks a bit strange with street addresses in the country column, but I think that this is more likely to be a data issue that a problem with your program.

I have looked the the rest of the Tabs and they are all returning records, I need to spend the day making some Birthday cards but will hava look at these in more detail later

Thanks so much for providing this Program as it is allowing my to study my data in a way I have wanted to do for a long time. I work with Excel as a major part of my job and use its Tables and Pivot Tables for data analysis all the time. If anyone need any help with this side of things just yell

 

[AnneC]

Are there any boxes popping up? Particularly any that say click details, continue etc?

No, no pop-up boxes.

Does it say the right person its using as the "starter" person. ie: Calculating Relationships using X as starter person.

It is using the correct "starter" (at least as far as the data is concerned......I keep meaning to change it, but that's another unrelated issue!)

I've not tested a tree with any cousins marrying cousins type tree, do you have anything of that nature.

I do know of a couple of cousins marrying cousins, I wonder if that is the problem?

 

[AdrienneQ]

I've not tested a tree with any cousins marrying cousins type tree, do you have anything of that nature.

Two of my mums cousins married and my data has gone through fine.
E Hesketh and N Dew were cousins GFather Thomas Smith Hesketh

 

[Alexander Bisset]

On the locations tab double click the row with an odd address and it lists who is at that address, so you can verify the nature of the address. The columns it uses are country, county, parish, street, house. Now of course not every address follows this format hence the reason you get some addresses showing in "wrong" columns.

The family identifier for an individual is tricky as each individual can be in numerous families eg: in a family as a child (potentially more than one if parents re-marry), in a family as a husband/wife (potentially more than one for each marriage). So an individual can be in several family groups, and thus have several different family gedcom ids.

Perhaps what I should do is create a families tab and list all the families so you could double click a families details and see everyone in that family. Or have a top/bottom arrangement where selecting a family at the top window listed the family members in the bottom window.

Note that once you "clean up" your data you can re-export a GEDCOM and import it again into the program to see what progress you have made. This sort of iterative, list, fix, list approach helps you understand your data better.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

It is using the correct "starter" (at least as far as the data is concerned......I keep meaning to change it, but that's another unrelated issue!)

I wonder if that might be the issue the program uses the starter person to work out parents, grandparents etc. I wonder if that starter person isn't related to large groups of people in the tree if it then gets upset and can't finish. I can experiment with that idea later on today, meantime I'm popping to visit a steam train.

 

[AnneC]

I wonder if that might be the issue the program uses the starter person to work out parents, grandparents etc. I wonder if that starter person isn't related to large groups of people in the tree if it then gets upset and can't finish. I can experiment with that idea later on today, meantime I'm popping to visit a steam train.

I don't think that is the problem as the starter (although wrong for my family) is closely related . Enjoy the steam train!

 

[AdrienneQ]

On the locations tab double click the row with an odd address and it lists who is at that address, so you can verify the nature of the address.

Thanks that's a great help

 

[AndyMick]

<snip>
Press the Show more detail button (its an arrow that points to the right).
<snip>

Ah-ha - that's the key thing I was missing. Thanks Tim.

I'll have a play with the data - and with Alexander's programme.

Incidentally, whilst I was checking the numbers, I thought to check for new contacts. Yes, found one! Thanks, Peter!

Talking of Peter, he's right to say he said he thought my Excel/IE macros would be of interest only to ONS - but so far I was right to paraphrase him about the lack of any interest!

I was thinking (not easy ATM with the toothache) that the thing that puts most people off entering ancestors is the need to re-transcribe the census entry from Ancestry (or the LDS or wherever) into LC. I presume that getting (licencing?) the 1881 census data into LC would cost an arm and a leg, and would not be recouped by restricting access to subscribers. I wonder if there are other ways? I think I once wrote a programme which scraped data off Ancestry's "view record" into a CSV file - but that would be a bit messy for the average punter.

 

[Bob Spiers]

For some reason the CTRL V does not work for me in Excel after a successful CTRL A 'blueing out' in LC. It also does not permit Paste Special by the CTRL A route. However by doing a manual copy after scrolling down to select all (more fiddly I agree) the Paste Special then works. The same end, just a tad longer.

I transfer by Alphabet sort from LC and then use Excel to create other worksheets for other sort sequences, like Census year, etc.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

CTRL A simply is "select all" you then need CTRL C to copy before going to Excel to use CTRL V or paste special.

 

[Bob Spiers]

CTRL A simply is "select all" you then need CTRL C to copy before going to Excel to use CTRL V or paste special.

Yes, of course: thanks. In excuse I have not used CTRL A before, and indeed invariably take the mouse route for copy & pasting, although I recall the keyboard route for those two actions. I suppose I thought CTRL A was a master Select All & Copy. Silly me.

 

[Tim]

Apologies Bob, I have amended my initial post to make it clearer.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

I would be interesting in identifying the "8 lone individuals as single families" and who makes up the 1414 families.
Would it be possible to add the family identifier (FamilyGed) to the Individuals Tab.

I've released v1.3.8.0 which includes a new "Families" tab. Your lone individuals will be at the bottom of the list without a FamilyGed. The rest of the list shows the husband/wife/children for each family identified in the GEDCOM along with the most detailed address it finds and a count of the number of people in that family. I did note from my own tree that some family gedcom IDs can remain after people have been merged/moved with other individuals. I've yet to investigate why this is the case, it is probably down to how the FTM 2012 (in my case) records families.

Some of my location data looks a bit strange with street addresses in the country column, but I think that this is more likely to be a data issue that a problem with your program.

If you have a street address in the COUNTRY (I'd thought you said county) column it is going to be because the program cannot work out which country let alone county you are referring to. I do a lot of data validation on loading making educated guesses on location names to try to make them consistent. eg: using common abbreviations and silently converting that to full names for use in the program. In the resources directory is the conversion file FactLocationFixes.xml however if a location is entered as say "51 High Street". Then the program has nothing to go on and will just represent that at the top level.

It tries to partition Country, County, Parish, Street, House as the different levels in order to make grouping easier to find people. I plan on adding a Google Maps view so it would plot all the locations in your file on a Google Map. Although obviously the first stage to plotting locations on a map is to ensure locations are consistently recorded, eg: fixing spelling mistakes etc. This is part of what the program is good at ie: organising your data so it is easy to see where you might have spelt Egnland wrongly, so you can correct it in your master file.

The program is all about analysis and presenting data, so you can find information more easily and add new information and correct any errors in your usual program, then re-export to analyse the data again.

 

[Norman]

Here's a vote for Alexander's program Family Tree Analyzer that I've been using for the last few days.

I have had no matches on LC having only added 80 or so entries. On reading about the program earlier in the discussion I decided to give it a try. I downloaded the latest version 4 days ago.

The program works by importing or opening a gedcom (GEnealogical Data COMmunication) file that most Genealogy programs can generate. Each time you use the program you have to "Open" a gedcom file as it doesn't retain the data between sessions. This is no problem as it takes, on my PC, about 2 seconds to import 1793 individuals. It also means that you are sure of using the latest data as long as you are vigilant about re-generating GED files periodically. The first time I tried the program it wouldn't load my GED file just hanging and/or giving an error message. I contacted Alexander and explained the problem and, within a few hours, a new version of the program was available for download. In fact, over the last few days, there have been 4 new versions made available, each one making some small, but significant, improvement. The program notifies you, at start-up, if a new version is available.

The problem that stopped the first version working was the encounter of some invalid date formats in the GED file. The program now logs the problem but continues, allowing you to investigate and correct the problem before generating a new GED file.

What does the program do?

• It produces a complete list of individuals with their vital data including Ahnentafel No.
• It lists all the families in the data
• It lists all the Locations in the data with Country, Region, Parish and Address
• It produces a list of "Loose Deaths" (see first post from Alexander in this discussion)
• It produces complete lists of people entered on any selectable Census

The program also has some extra functionality in the ability to search the IGI databases and listing those men alive during either of the two "world wars". It also lists those individuals at the top of each branch of the ancestral tree.

The reason I decided to try the program was it's ability to list those individuals who have had census data entered for the 1841, 1881 & 1911 England and Wales censuses. (It also works for the other LC supported census). It lists the individuals by family and highlights those individuals who are "Direct Ancestors". One thing that caught me out was that Ancestry treats a census entry as proof of residence rather than a Census fact. There is a "checkbox" that should be selected if your census entries are listed as "residence" facts.

This leads me to the final reason for my use of the program. Alexander uses Ancestry.co.uk and also Family Tree Maker 2012, as do I. This combination has the ability to keep in synchronisation with entries made on you PC in FTM2012 being uploaded to Ancestry and vice-versa. Alexander has catered for the ability to filter out of the LC lists those entries that you have already made in Lost Cousins. It does this by making use of the fact that FTM2012 has the ability to create "custom" facts i.e. user defined facts. If you make a custom fact called "Lost Cousins" and use that fact to enter the year of the census that has been entered for the individual then the program will not report the person as requiring entry to LC. You may add the fact more than once for an individual so that you can record entries for multiple censuses.

To add the custom fact in FTM2012 go to Edit->Manage Facts then select "New" and add the entries as below.

Sorry for the long post!

 

[Tim]

So Norman, how many individuals and households, and how many different census's can you now add to LC?

 

[Norman]

9 families and 21 records from 1841 census
53 families and 167 records from 1881 census
26 families and 68 records from 1911 census

Not sure whether they'll all get entered though. This process has highlighted a few other problems that need sorting too.

 

[Andrew Bannister]

........ I'm popping to visit a steam train.

Sorry to go off-track, so to speak, but might I ask which and where?

 

[Tim]

9 families and 21 records from 1841 census
53 families and 167 records from 1881 census
26 families and 68 records from 1911 census

Not sure whether they'll all get entered though. This process has highlighted a few other problems that need sorting too.

Well its excellent news about the people you can add. Just think about all those new cousins that could be out there waiting for you!

And if its highlighted problems you didn't know you had, then that also is good news.

 

[Bee]

Like Norman, I've been having a go at Alexander's program and agree with everything he said about it. I scribbled down some queries but then an updated version answered them. However, I have found that in the list created for potential candidates for Lost Cousins entry from the 1881 census (the only one I've tried so far) several names were repeated. This was because they had been married more than once. In one case the name came up four times! It's not a problem but the records number is therefore inflated slightly.

As Norman suggested I have created a custom fact label so now must put it to use. A long job - over 1000 to enter ....

Just a couple of questions for now: What does 'loose deaths' mean when I have a year entered? And, how do I print the list created in the War Dead tab? It's not practical to click back and forth.

The 'best location' in the Individuals tab caused a chuckle. When scrolling down I came across 'village churchyard'.

Thank you Alexander.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Sorry to go off-track, so to speak, but might I ask which and where?

I'd popped to Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. Tomorrow is apparently the 40th Anniversary of the North York Moors Railway so might be popping there or heading to their Gala Weekend on Friday.