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Uploading GEDCOM - problem with dates

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Sarah

Sarah Report 18 Sep 2006 17:52

I'm using FTM and have uploaded my tree numerous times over the months. It always processes successfully, but there's a problem with the info displayed. For births and deaths I often use 'before' a given (for example when I only know the baptism or burial date). When this uploads it drops the 'BEF' but also drops the year part of the date, so everyone ends up with something like '21 Jan' only. The site won't allow me to do any updates. I have about 7,000 people in my tree, so producing a file by hand where I delete all the 'before' and 'after' tags is just not practical. The Support people had no suggestions to offer, despite this site saying it can handle GEDCOM files from FTM. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there some option that I should select when exporting the tree from FTM? Any help gratefully received Sarah

Uncle John

Uncle John Report 18 Sep 2006 19:44

Aha - is this the dreaded Double Year Syndrome? A 'feature' of FTM, which can't be disabled, is that for dates during the overlap of the Julian and Gregorian calendars (roughly 1700 to 1740), FTM automatically shows dates from January to March with 2 years (e.g. 1728/29). This is because everything up to the end of March was in the previous year, and the new year began at April. This changed to what we have now when the Gregorian calendar became compulsory about 1740. When your GEDCOM is created, the double year is reproduced, but the import program used by GR doesn't know what to do, so it mangles the year. I reported this to GR some months ago but as far as I know it's still on the back burner. If you look in the FTM help file it explains about double dates. John

Gordon

Gordon Report 18 Sep 2006 20:51

I don't think there's anything you can do about it :( The GR database holds dates in a different format to GEDcom files. If it doesn't understand the date it seems to try to quote it verbatim *but* sometimes the date is too long. So ABT 1867 or BEF 2000 will transfer over, but BEF 21 Jan 1865 is too much for the system to cope with... Gordon

Carol

Carol Report 18 Sep 2006 23:53

It's because it's not standard gedcom. If you put in something like Before or Circa it is not standard gedcom and some programns will ignore it. The standard gedcom format when you have any doubt about it as an exact date is Abt. Carol www*genealogyprinters*com