V8.00-8.04 picklist errors for birth & death / fixed after new restore but no memo / using existing V7 for data entry and abandoning V8 for now

[retsof 0]

I have seen this error in all versions so far of 8: V8.00, V8.01, V8.02 and V8.04.

 

SOME birth dates and death dates appear in the picklist and some do not, even for the same individual with duplicate records. I have many duplicate records I am trying to merge from different GEDCOM imports but this makes it a lot more difficult. I can match several on surname. Some show the birth dates and death dates and some do not even though one or both birth date and death date and also sort date are actually in the record. Updating the record and changing the birth date does not make the birth date appear in the picklist, so I do not know what is causing the problem.

 

When birth date or death date is used as the primary field they are sorted, but there could still be a lot of the blanks in the pick list. It is more difficult to analyze when I am only looking at thousands of blank birth dates in the picklist. I did check one sorted by primary birthdate that had the same surname, given name and a blank birth date, and the birth date is in the field.

 

Everything worked fine in V7+. Something in the search picklist changed in V8.

Edited May 10, 2012 by retsof

[LornaHenderson 0]

retsof

For the people with the missing birth and death dates are there primary birth and death dates defined?

Have you tried running the file maitenance routines?

If that doesn't help have you looked at John Cardinal's TMG utility under People, Adjust Birth and Death?

[Michael Hannah 0]

Only the date from the one tag in each of the Birth and Death groups which is marked Primary will show in the Picklist. Even if there are Birth and Death tags, if none are marked Primary no date will show in the Picklist. I do not believe anything has changed in this respect.

 

You can find all people who have at least one tag in the Birth group, but have no tag marked Primary with the following filter:

X || Birth Group... || # of Tags || = Equals          || 0 || AND  || Birth Group... || # of Tags || > Is greater than || 0 || END

Note carefully that the first test condition has the beginning box checked, and the second condition does not. That box restricts that test condition to Primary tags.

 

For these people you will need to select one of their tags in the Birth group and make it Primary for them to have a date in the picklist. Remember that to make a tag Primary, simply highlight (click on) that tag and then press the Asterisk '*' key.

 

You can do a similar thing to find all people who have at least one tag in the Death group, but have no tag marked Primary.

 

You can use these filters in either the Project Explorer or a List of People report.

 

Hope this gives you ideas,

[retsof 0]

Why were all of the primary birthdates in the picklist in version 7? The identical record sets had primary birthdates and primary deathdates for each.

 

That could be the problem, and adding a primary tag to a birthdate does fix the picklist and show it for that record. (Good catch!) They USED to be there in V7. WHY the primary tags were removed I don't know. It appears that the version 8 conversion left one primary birth date there for a set of identical records, and removed it for second and subsequent identical records. Was that really a good idea?

 

Yes, I had run optimize, VFI, and optimize several times in V8 when I first noticed the problem.

 

If I can find two identical records, I won't bother to add a primary tag to the second. I will simply merge them.

Edited May 6, 2012 by retsof

[retsof 0]

I am getting closer.

 

I backed up the V7 file and did a restore to V8.

The primary birthdates all show up in the picklist now.

 

An earlier V8.00 restore could have had problems but showed no outward indication by message.

 

On the other hand, V8.04 now says that the memo file was missing or invalid and there are some other problems like a STRINGSFLAG alias that cannot be found.

 

I backed up the V7 file and did another restore to V8.

The memo file is still missing or invalid.

 

I am now running the optimize, VFI and optimize on the original V7 file and will back it up again. (I really had not made that many changes since I started trying to migrate to V8.) No problems were found by the VFI.

Both V7 and V8 are on hold for data entry and cleanup until something seems more stable, and have been so for about 6 months due to this problem.

 

The backups have been made with normal compression.

SAME ERROR with missing memo file.

 

I will backup V7 again with compression=none. The SQZ algorithm has caused problems for me in the past, especially during a numbered release conversion from V6 to V7.

 

SAME ERROR so I am kind of stuck now. The restore seems to run a little differently in each minor version.

 

If I ignore the error I can see the records with all of my primary birth dates in the picklist. HOWEVER there are no memo records (I compared one from V7) so I may make some updates in V7 and forget about V8 for now.

Edited May 10, 2012 by retsof