Genealogy Chat

Gedcom errors in GR downloads are a certain fact is SOME downloaded gedcoms from GR.

It does not affect every gedcom, just some.

What happens is that the dates are affected and instead of a normal date the year date will appear as 0000.

If you download your gedcom from GR it can be a very long process to check every date in your file but there is a short cut.

Save the GR gedcom file to you Desktop, right click on it and select "Open With" from the menu, select or browse for "Wordpad" or "Notepad" as the program to open it, both of these programs are installed as part of the Windows operating system so everybody has them installed on their PC.

When the gedcom opens it will not make a lot of sense but you can see the data contained in it although it's a bit garbled, you edit the gedcom using either of the above programs.

When it's open click on Edit at the top and a drop down menu will appear, click on Find and another window will open, type in 0000 into the "Find What" window and click "Find Next", the program will now search for and find all the entries that contain the figures 0000, when it finds one click on it once to highlight it then double click on it again and you can edit it, once edited click Find Next again and it will look for any other entries in the file that contain 0000, you can work your way through the entire file and find every entry that conatins anything that you type into the Find What window, this process can be used for editing any gedcom file when searching for any entry that might be suspect.

Whe you have finished editing the file click on the X at the top right of the screen to close the program, YOU MUST SAY YES TO SAVE THE CHANGES.

Your gedcom is now corrected and you can import it to wherever you want.

Carol
www.genealogyprinters.com

Well done Carol

I wish id'e known a few months ago,it would of saved me hours doing it the longway.

I never download gedcom file from GR always do all work in a decent tree prog on pc then upload to here. Also to a couple of other sites and also to local backup disk. Just imagine all those hours spent tracing your ancestors and you lose the lot because you only have your tree in one place - and that one place loses or corrupts your data.

Old IT saying "You can never have too many backups"
In reality - One on here - one on your PC - one a another site - one on a backup cd at home - and one on a backup cd at a friends or relatives house. Should be enough. But The most Important are the PC/CD at home and the cd at someone elses house

Gary