Gedcom and Memos

[E Wilcock 0]

I have been looking again at the question of GEDCOM export.

I chose to use TMG because TMG could handle long memo fields which I had used in my previous Generations software. Terry Riegel recently reminded us how useful they are for combining separate occupation tags and producing biographical narratives.

 

Could someone please help me understand what happens to these long memos when exported via GEDCOM.

 

I have re-read Jim Byram's chapter on Exporting Data in Getting the Most Out of TMG. As explained by Jim, the whole memo should be divided up into CONT sections. But in some of my efforts, I noticed the end of my Memos allocated to a CONC section or sections which conclude the Event record, sometimes coming after the date and place.

 

Please don't dismiss my interest in GEDCOM as a means of enabling software packages to exchange their data.

 

I want to work out the best GEDCOM settings for export to FTM which many of our UK relatives use.

 

After experiment, I have found that the default GEDCOM which has a short (80) line length allows me to export everything to FTM UK 2009, though the Memos don't get placed into the Notes field.

 

One leading UK family history program "Family Historian" works directly from a GEDCOM file. But I still have no success with that. It seems to import only the first chunk of memo (so the longer the better) - the rest is lost. If anyone else has managed this, please do post.

[Jim Byram 0]

Memos are exported exactly according to the GEDCOM specs. You should have no need to mess with that. Tomorrow, I'll take a look at how they are imported into FTM 2009.

[jim.orrell 0]

From my experience exporting GEDCOM to FTM (n.b. this relates to FTM 2006, so it might be different for 2009), there are 2 things to take into account.

 

1. I always use a GEDCOM line length of 246 rather than the default 80. For the main tags like BMD, instead of your memo being truncated to 80 chars, you get 246. Still not a lot if you have long memos.

 

2. If you are willing to have all your memos lumped together in FTMs "notes", you will have to use the Master Tag Type List. I use this for Event type Tags (e.g. census), but can't say for others, you will have to experiment. Edit the Tag, under "other" you will see "GEDCOM Export as", I click on the 2nd option (not Tag). For some reason FTM2006 imports the memo into its general notes for the person, but it is not truncated. Someone else might be able to explain why this happens, after a lot of frustration, I found out empirically.

 

I find similar problems arise with other conversions (e.g. GRU). So whenever I key into the memo field I indicate what sort of tag it is,

e.g. <census 1891>etc etc etc,

so that if the memo gets removed from the parent tag, it is still obvious where it fits in.

[E Wilcock 0]

I think FTM 2009 is different. If I leave the line length to 80 which is the default, FTM 2009 seems to taKE IN

[Jim Byram 0]

I don't see any particular issues with the import of notes into FTM 2009. Event notes typically go to the event note field. Occupation notes go to the description field.

[E Wilcock 0]

I don't see any particular issues with the import of notes into FTM 2009. Event notes typically go to the event note field. Occupation notes go to the description field.

 

Thank you Jim. It was kind of you to take the time. I agree. I am pretty happy with transfer to FTM 2009 - I tend to put a lot of biography into Occupation. May be I need to think again.

 

However in experimenting I have manged to produce a faulty GEDCOM. Sorry.

 

I wanted the GEDCOM to export people who were not living. If I need to demonstrate GEDCOM problems, I want to exclude living people.

I went to the project explorer and filtered it for people not living.

I wasn't clear how to select these people (which would have given me the option to export) and couldn't find out how in Help. So I put them into a new focus group marked not living and used that method.

 

But when Exported as a GEDCOM, the receiving software notified me that it was a corrupt file with a person duplicated in it many times. I can see from reading the "not living" GEDCOM that the duplicated person is myself, right at the end of the file and my brother in law also still living is also their twice.

Yet if I look at the Focus group Not Living on screen of course neither of us is there because we are both alive.

It is hard for me to insist that TMG produces perfectly conventional GEDCOMs, if unknown to myself I am outputting imperfect GEDCOMs?

I don't know if this is my mis use, whether my Project is faulty or whether it is a bug.

 

Evelyn

[Jim Byram 0]

The normal way to handle non-living people when exporting is to export and select 'Suppress details for living people' on Step 5: Option screen 1.

 

Your description above doesn't give me any idea how to replicate what you did.

[E Wilcock 0]

Jim wrote I don't see any particular issues with the import of notes into FTM 2009. Event notes typically go to the event note field. Occupation notes go to the description field.

 

Does this mean that the Occupation Tag Note behaves differently from other Event Notes?

Is there a different GEDCOM convention for exporting Occupation and a corresponding limit on the permitted length of its Note?

 

I am still looking at the reasons I cant get my TMG text fields to transfer via GEDCOMs into other software, particularly Family Historian. The GEDCOMs exported from the TMG Sample files for both UK and USA present the same difficulty.

 

Evelyn

[Jim Byram 0]

Does this mean that the Occupation Tag Note behaves differently from other Event Notes?

 

Is there a different GEDCOM convention for exporting Occupation and a corresponding limit on the permitted length of its Note?

 

OCCU is a GEDCOM individual attribute rather than an individual event.

 

In a GEDCOM, the OCCU tag is typically expected to transmit the occupation and you would not expect the occupation to be a long text.

 

I would have to determine the length of the FTM Description field but would not expect it to be as long as a memo field so can see that long occupation text might be clipped.

[Michael Hannah 0]

I am still looking at the reasons I cant get my TMG text fields to transfer via GEDCOMs into other software, particularly Family Historian.

Hi Evelyn,

 

I would like to try to help. Could you provide more details about "exactly" what text fields in what TMG tags do not transfer into other software? The more detail of how/where it is entered in TMG the better. Further, for your own testing, realize that a GEDCOM file is simply a text file. So you can open the export file that TMG creates in something like Notepad and search for the text you expect to see. Then you can copy and paste the exact lines in that GEDCOM file which do not get into the other software.

[E Wilcock 0]

quote name='Michael Hannah' date='17 May 2009, 10:26 PM' post='44798'

Hi Evelyn,

 

I would like to try to help. Could you provide more details about "exactly" what text fields in what TMG tags do not transfer into other software?

 

Michael, Thank you. I d like to go through this with you.

 

I intend to look at these questions methodically and in detail next winter.

Yes, I read my GEDCOM files using notepad.exec

 

In the light of information given me on the Roots web Family Historian list Family Historian seems to have an issues with the TMG GEDCOM export of Event and Attribute Memos.

 

For some Tags e.g. Birth, the memo is exported as a Note. TMG Memos exported as Notes which exceed the line length are continued in lines headed CONC. This is said to be correct export.

 

But there is another group of Tags (such as Occupation) where the memo itself constitutes the material of the Tag. It would be helpful to have a list of the tags. Their memos are exported by TMG without the Memo being allocated to a subordinate note. Where the Memos are too long, they are again exported with the CONC or CONT continuation. Family Historian regards this as invalid GEDCOM.

 

The question overlaps with another: the GEDCOM permitted maximum character length of memos in these tags.

I dont know if there is an agreed length but my use may regularly exceed this.

 

It is possible that Family Historian allows a work round by permitting Event Memos with a GEDCOM line longer than the official maximum, possibly 500 characters. However, TMG GEDCOM export limits the export of a line to the standard maximum of 246. So even if a receiving programme allows for import of longer lines, one cannot take advantage of it.

 

In my own case there are two other factors to bear in mind. I use the UK edition of TMG. It has become clear that whenever Tags are concerned, the behaviour of the default UK edition of TMG may differ from that of the American. This is because the UK edition of TMG uses some "custom" Tags. The type and export default of these custom Tags may in some cases differ from the export of the USA version, producing different results.

 

GEDCOM transfer is also affected by my particular use of TMG. I follow Terry's model of creating narratives using the memo fields of such Tags as Occupation and Education. I did not realise that my use of them would create problems which other TMG users might not encounter.

 

I will now try to post this Michael.

Evelyn

Edited May 21, 2009 by E Wilcock

[Jim Byram 0]

But there is another group of Tags (such as Occupation) where the memo itself constitutes the material of the Tag. It would be helpful to have a list of the tags. Their memos are exported by TMG without the Memo being allocated to a subordinate note. Where the Memos are too long, they are again exported with the CONC or CONT continuation.

TMG uses the memo field for the occupation and exports the contents as the occupation. As Michael points out, the specs do say the occupation text should be 90 characters but there is no point to that in this context and the text would be clipped at 90 characters if that were the case.

 

Since the tag memo is used for the occupation, there is no separate memo field to export as a NOTE tag subordinate to the OCCU tag.

 

The GEDCOM specs say that the export for the EDUC tag (below) should be limited to 248 characters. TMG exports the entire memo contents but the export would be clipped at 248 characters if the specs were followed strictly and again, there is no point to doing this.

 

The GEDCOM 5.5 individual attributes tags are: CAST, DSCR, EDUC, IDNO, NATI, NCHI, NMR, OCCU, PROP, RELI, RESI, SSN, TITL. TMG tags that are exported as one of these GEDCOM tags should be exported the same way as exporting the Occupation tag works.

 

The question overlaps with another: the GEDCOM permitted maximum character length of memos in these tags.

I dont know if there is an agreed length but my use may regularly exceed this.

While TMG exports the entire memo field as the attribute text, the GEDCOM specs have a text character limit for the attribute used for each of the different attribute tags.

 

It is possible that Family Historian allows a work round by permitting Event Memos with a GEDCOM line longer than the official maximum, possibly 500 characters. However, TMG GEDCOM export limits the export of a line to the standard maximum of 246. So even if a receiving programme allows for import of longer lines, one cannot take advantage of it.

The GEDCOM 5.5 specs state: "The total length of a GEDCOM line, including leading white space, level number, cross-reference number, tag, value, delimiters, and terminator, must not exceed 255 (wide) characters." TMG follows this spec.

 

Any line in a GEDCOM can be extended with CONT/CONC tags following the GEDCOM specs so the line limit shouldn't be an issue.

 

In my own case there are two other factors to bear in mind. I use the UK edition of TMG. It has become clear that whenever Tags are concerned, the behaviour of the default UK edition of TMG may differ from that of the American. This is because the UK edition of TMG uses some "custom" Tags. The type and export default of these custom Tags may in some cases differ from the export of the USA version, producing different results.

By default, custom tags are exported as 1 EVEN 2 TYPE and this is how the UK census tags are set. That is correct if you want to retain the tag names when the tags are imported by other programs. If you want to export them all as CENS and have other programs import all UK census tags as 'Census' events, change the GEDCOM export setting to CENS.

 

GEDCOM transfer is also affected by my particular use of TMG. I follow Terry's model of creating narratives using the memo fields of such Tags as Occupation and Education. I did not realise that my use of them would create problems which other TMG users might not encounter.

This usage will not be compatible with GEDCOM export of those tags. If GEDCOM export is your concern, you will need to take another approach. Using advanced features in TMG is to a great extent incompatible with GEDCOM export.

[E Wilcock 0]

Thank you Jim,

That is very clear and very helpful.

 

Evelyn

[E Wilcock 0]

This thread has explained the discrepancy between the GEDCOM spec of TMG and that of the UK software, Family Historian which works directly from a GEDCOM file. The transfer from TMG to FH was a problem for users like myself who had long narratives in Tags e.g for Education and Occupation.

 

It seems useful for the record to post here that the problem has now been resolved. An expert user of Family Historian who shares my interest in the transfer of data between different programs has kindly written a free program that converts TMG Gedcom Tag Memos into the form required by Family Historian.

 

http://www.fhug.org.uk/cgi-bin/index.cgi?a...edCom&id=16

 

Evelyn

[Jon Axtell 0]

As the author of the program that Evelyn mentions I would also add that TMG users who are sharing Gedcom with users of other genealogy packages might also like to use the program as it amends the Gedcom to follow the standard a bit more closely.

 

If you make use of it and find that you still have errors being listed by the other package please get in touch with me (email address in the program) and I would be happy to amend the program to handle them.

 

Jon