Genealogy Chat

I have heard so many good things said about FTM 2010 on this board, so I took the plunge and bought it. I confess that so far I am pretty disapointed, but I hope that someone here may be able to guide me to some solutions. I transferred my tree by gedcom from GR to FTM and have a long error report full of date errors. I think these are mostly where I have identified an event as occuring in Qx yyyy, so I will have to change all those to Mar,Jun,Sept,Dec etc. unless someone knows an alternative solution.
The biggest problem I have is with the Places section. FTM has taken all the occupations from my GR tree and listed them amongst the Places. Anyone know how I can disentangle jobs from places please?
It also seems incapable of identifying the whereabouts of most large towns on the map. I have read in the help file how to resolve Place errors, but it seems I will then lose the detail of which churc/hospital/address an event occurred at.
Anyone else tackled these problems before please?

All that I can suggest is the way I enter info on Genes
Year of birth--year only
Date of birth-- must be exact eg 01/02/1991
Place of birth----------eg St Helier Jersey, Channel Islands
Address and Gro ref go in "notes"

The problem isn't with FTM it is with your GR data and the way that GR tries to export it onto a gedcom.

FTM imposes an element of structure and standardisation on the way that you maintain your information. GR, on the other hand imposes a different, and possible less rigid set of rules and to make matters even worse, only supports a limited number of gedcom tags.

I never export from GR, only from FTM which is my main source of data to other destinations. But just out of interest, I imported a GR file containing supposedly the same info that I had just exported from FTM and it contained date errors and misplaced tags. Information in facts and certain notes was lost altogether, which confirms the type of issues you are experiencing.

Personally, I would bite the bullet and sort out your FTM data, then keep this clean.

Dates such as Sep 1895 are ok., I use Abt Sep 1895 to denote that the data is assumed from a BMD index, for which I don't have the actual cert. You can also use Bet Jan - Mar 1895 on FTM.

To use the places options, you need to have clean data. FTM has an internal directory of preferred place names. Why not move the detail such as hospital, church into the notes section or better still use a 'Fact' You can create a new Fact if there isn't a suitable one in the directory.

The problem with jobs and place is also causes by the way your GR data transferred. Again it may be due to the way you recorded it on GR or limitations with the gedcom transfer. No easy option, other than correcting each one that is wrong.

I use a Fact to record occupation, you can has many instances as you want, each with an optional date. So Occupation 1881 Coal Miner is my way of recording the occupation at the time of the 1881 census. Then there might be Occupation 1906 Engine Driver, taken from a marriage cert.

Good luck - you only need to fix it once. After that you upload back to sites such as GR or Ancestry, never the other way.

Thank you very much Inspector for such a detailed reply - that will be very helpful. I suppose I have been taken by surprise at the amount of work I will have to do to switch over to FTM.
What happens to 'Facts' when you gedcom from FTM to GR? For example, GR has a heading for Occupation, but I guess an occupation listed as a fact on FTM will not end up in that box if I transfer FTM to GR.

According to GR's Help File

"You will be able to upload the following information : baptism date, place of baptism, marriage date, place of marriage, occupation, known as (nickname), source of data and notes"

So in your example Occupation would be supported

From my point of view I now consider GR as a list of names that I might want to share or match with other researchers. It no longer matters if the subsidiary information isn't all there, or if the tree display or printing options are limited. My FTM version is the 'bible' as far as I am concerned.

Like you I currently have the correction job to do.

I transferred from a really old Sierra family tree programme to FTM 2010 and am now working my way through doing the corrections as FTM didn't like MQ, JQ etc. so left the date out.