I have recently noticed a problem when a certain date format is made in places such as Date of Birth, Death, Burial, Christening, etc.
If I use a 'Single Date' format and enter say 'About Feb 3 1556/57' for some reason the system records it and displays it as 'About Feb 3 1554/55'. If I change this and enter 'About Feb 3 1556/7' I get the same result, i.e. 'About Feb 3 1554/55'. This also happens when I use an exact date. Even if I use the Free Format Text option and enter it in the same format as a Single Date would, the result is still the same.
This was never an issue previously and I have just noticed it after I have upgraded to the latest version, 4.0.0.897.
The way the system handled the date previously is a better option, unless there is something I am doing incorrectly. Please advise if this is a System issue and when it can be expected to be fixed. Many thanks.
No need to uninstall. Just install on top of your current version.
I downloaded, installed and tried again and I still have the same problem i.e. a date entered as Feb 3 1555/56 gets shown as Feb 3 1553/54. Back to you...
I have discovered a somewhat similar problem, but maybe it's just a different convention and not a bug.
I use the Swedish language version of MyHeritage, and here in Sweden we specify dates according to the international ISO standard: YYYY-MM-DD. However, if I enter 2000-05-01 (meaning "first of May"), the system interprets this as fifth of January.
To change the format of the dates doesn't fix the problem. Finnish language dates DD-MM-YYYY turns to be out of a gedcom-file MM-DD-YYYY - f.e. 01.05.2000 (first-of-May) becomes to 5. Jan 2000, no matter if I use english or finnish on FTB. With thousands of dates to fix I'm puzzled :-I
this is why the genealogy standard is either May 1 1995 or Jan 5 1990. When you enter dates to FTB you should enter them in this way, or use the date picker to pick an exact date (the icon of the calendar next to the date field).
If you already have many of these ambiguous dates, I recommend on fixing them this way (not manually):
1 Close FTB
2. Go to My Documents \ My Heritage \ (your project name) \ Databse
3. Back up the .zed file inside, so that you can always go back to it in case of trouble.
4. Open the zed file with WinZip, WinRar, etc
5. Edit the text file within with notepad, or another text editing program.
6. Use the Find and Replace command to replace all ".1." instances with " Jan " (note that you need to replace the two periods with two space characthers, before and after the string "Jan")
7. Go over the file and make sure this change corrected the dates and made them non-ambiguous.
8. Repeat the Find and Replace action 11 more times, once for each month.
The date form such a 1.5.1990 (1st of May) is a standar in Finland and around Europe. When all do it in the same way it's not ambiguous. It was not like that some 100-150 years ago and backwards. To interpret old records from that period is quite tricky 'cos the ambiguous dates. Anyway, the fix you recommended really worked! It's just that dates instead of 1.5.1990 -form were in the form 1 5 1990 (without dots) in the .zed-file, so 12 find-and-replace were not enough but 12x12=144 times (days 1-12 for every month) were required to do it. It took an hour and a half or so, not bad at all I say.
Thank You. And for the others who will possibly have the same problem I say in finnish (so that they can google it out):
Miten saan vaihdettua päivämäärät Family Tree Builderissa oikein päin? Kuukaudet ja päivät ovat väärinpäin.
I have a situation where the woman was married subsequently divorced. No children were born of the marriage.
The woman subsequently had a child out-of-wedlock with another man. They never married.
I'm having a hell of a time trying to show the relationships! Either the software wants to make the child a child of the woman and her ex-husband, which isn't correct, or it wants to make the natural parents married, which they never were.
Surely there must be a way to show that this woman married and divorced with no children; then had a child with a man she wasn't married to, and yet still show the child's natural parents?
If there's no way to do this, then I can't use this software.
3. Right click on either the woman or husband. Choose Spouses > Manage Spouses. Set this relationship to "Divorced".
4. Right click on the woman. Choose Spouses > Add Spouse. Add the woman's partner (the partner she had a child with).
5. Right click on the partner. Choose Spouses > Manage Spouses. Set this relationship to "Partners" or choose any of the other suitable descriptions in the list as you see fit.
Well, in theory, one would think that this would work. However, it doesn't. I've followed your exact procedural instructions several times. This is what happens:
Add the woman. Add the husband and set to divorced. Fine. So far so good.
Now add the second partner, who the woman neither married nor had a long-term relationship. I've selected "other". So far, so good.
Now add the child. When I add the child, it automatically adds him to the second "family" and shows the father as being married to the woman.
Now I go back and try to put in "other" again for that relationship. Fine.
Now, the child is no longer the child of the woman, but is the "natural" child of the man. It shows the woman as not being related!
Very exasperating!
I've tried it all different ways, and it all comes out the same. Either the child can be the natural child of two "married" people or the natural child of one and not related to the other.
I've added and deleted these four people over and over and over again, and it all turns out the same.
It's very frustrating, and if I can't figure it out, or if the software automatically "marries" the two parents, I won't be able to use this software program.
Yes, I know because I did these exact same steps - MANY TIMES, and still, what happens is that the second "spouse", which isn't a spouse at all, ends up being shown as the "husband" of the woman.
What's even worse is that the father of the illegitimate child is divorced from one woman and they had no children, and is now married to another woman. When I added all that into the mix, it shows the father of the illegitimate child as being married to the mother of the child, AND being married to another woman! And every time you go to the list of people, it shows the father of the child as being married to the mother of the child, when in fact, they were never married.
And obviously, you say you tried this yourself, but you couldn't have checked for the relationship factors AFTER you did these steps, because if you did, you would see that the "pop-up" relationship box that shows whenever you put your mouse on a name, would have shown you that the father of the child was still the "husband" of the mother, even though they never married. You know, if the woman was raped, that would be very offensive.
People in this family are very sensitive to this issue, and I'm not going to publish something to a website, or use software that can't acknowledge illegitimate children or children born out-of-wedlock.
I've decided to go with another software package and so now I really would like to take my family site down from Heritage.com, but can't find a way to delete that, either. In fact, in opening one file that was sent to me - of totally unrelated people to my family - heritage.com not only opened the file, but uploaded it. So now I basically have a cemetery list that shows as my family! This is absolutely the WORST software ever! I've deleted it from my computer.
It sounds like the issue you are experiencing is not with the ability to add people/second marriages/etc in your tree in Family Tree Builder, but rather after publishing the tree, how different areas of your family site display that information.
From the standpoint of the system the relationships that are calculated on your family site are completely different as far as coding, and therefore, troubleshooting are concerned.
I know you said you have decided not to use Family Tree Builder anymore, and that is fine, but if you would like, I am willing to continue to help you. I'll need you to tell me the exact places where the relationship is shown incorrectly.
If a tree was published even if you didn't intend to publish it, you may have the automatic backup feature turned on. If you open Family Tree Builder and click on Tools > Options > Publishing you should see a field titled "Publish projects automatically to my sites". Click on the YES in this field to change it to NO. This will prevent your family trees from being published automatically as a backup.
I can delete your family site for you. Just send me the URL of the family site.
I'm currently looking at a couple of genealogical software alternatives that are NOT associated with the Mormons. For some reason, I think that's part of the problem, because they have some weird beliefs concerning marriage and children. Maybe that's why their software seems to have no problem showing men married to multiple women!
It is curious that Mormons are prominent in genealogy software... I don't know the exact roots of the MyHeritage and FTB software, but the company founders certainly have nothing to do with Mormons and seem to have enough technological know-how to move things along:
My previous efforts in setting up a family tree were in DOS days using organisational software, so it was very limited and I did not get very far. Recently a public institution that has a genealogy dept which holds certain types of trees sent me a tree established by someone else but containing us, because I wanted to update it.
They recommended MyHeritage FTB, which I downloaded and with which I imported the GEDCOM file. I am still working on amendments.
I don't know anything else but I find FTB dead easy to use, though I can see issues such as yours looming. I have problems with understanding the definitions of Immigration, Settlement, Move etc. There is no compendium of terms. Then I see that (non-marriage) name changes are not displayed even in FTB, One has to go into the details of individuals to find them.
This 'main' tree is now too big to publish on the web for free and I am not sure I would want to. However, I built a small tree (28 members) for another family from scratch and published it, as an exercise to see how the systems worked.
Nevertheless, given the complexity of real life, I think FTB is still great and the owners appear to be dealing with bugs and trying to make improvements.
I don't know how stiff the competition for free apps is, but online there is a lot, Google's Geni must be pretty big.
Actually, heritage.com is indeed affiliated with the LDS church. In fact, if you look at the software, there's even an icon that says "temple", and you also have the option to upload your gedcom to them. I've read that the LDS (Mormons) have this thing about "sealing" marriages and also about being able to get their dead relatives into the "celestial kingdom", as they call it. At any rate, if you play around with their software, you'll see what I mean.
I'm currently checking out The Master Genealogist software and Roots Magic. I'll post my thoughts on that. It is frustrating, though, when you're doing family genealogies and dealing with sometimes complex relationships. For example, you might see a woman whose husband dies, and she remarries - her husband's brother. You can imagine the problems that arise with software on that one!
As far as LDS software goes, whether you're dealing with Legacy, Heritage, Family Tree maker, etc., they're all Mormon-based. They have probably the biggest genealogy research project and database on the planet.
MyHeritage.com is start up founded by Gilad Japhet in 2003 in Bnei Atarot, Israel.
We are a privately help company and not affiliated with any LDS church or "Mormon-based" companies.
Here is a link to the MyHeritage.com wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyHeritage
Here is a link to our company profile on TechCrunch (a highly ranked independent technology blog): http://www.crunchbase.com/company/myheritage.
MyHeritage.com may have been conceived in Israel, but our goal is to provide tools for genealogists of all creeds. Genealogy is a shared passion of people from around the world. We didn't work so hard to make our products available in 34 languages for nothing.
Our Family Tree Builder software does have facts such as baptism, child sealing, endowment, etc. for LDS users. It also has facts for users of many other religions and nationalities.
As for the complex relationship you mention, it is possible to create this "widow who married her husband's brother" relationship in Family Tree Builder using the Attach Spouse option.
As it happens "temple" is also a term widely used by American Jews to refer to the synagogue, and the marriage to which you refer could be, depending on circumstances, a levirate marriage, and was practised by the Israelites and other ancient peoples:
It is highly likely Mormons acquired the custom from the Hebrew Bible. Given that the MyHeritage founders are Jewish and (now) genealogy specialists, at least some of them should be aware of this marital arrangement, even if very rare (among Jews) nowadays.
Whatever it is, I look forward to your comments on the alternatives.
