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SimonShaw

Importing GedCom Problem

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I am currently trying to Import a Gedcom file into TMG, and it says it has a missing header. I had a quick look at the file in notepad, and to be honest it looks fine. Not that I am an expert at reading these things in there raw state.

 

It certainly starts with a "0 HEAD" line.

 

Does anyone have any ideas why TMG wouldn't like it?

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I am currently trying to Import a Gedcom file into TMG, and it says it has a missing header. I had a quick look at the file in notepad, and to be honest it looks fine. Not that I am an expert at reading these things in there raw state.

 

It certainly starts with a "0 HEAD" line.

 

Does anyone have any ideas why TMG wouldn't like it?

probably cos it was created in paf ?

 

Open it in a text editor and save as a text file and try again.

If there are any odd characters there, delete them before saving.

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Thanks for the reply. It is a PAF created file so I assume there are known problems with them.

 

I tried opening it in notepad, saving it as a text file then renaming it back to a GED file but get the same problem. Looking at it in a text editor I can't see any funny characters, just a crlf at the end of each line.

 

any other ideas?

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Guest ProudFossil
Thanks for the reply. It is a PAF created file so I assume there are known problems with them.

 

I tried opening it in notepad, saving it as a text file then renaming it back to a GED file but get the same problem. Looking at it in a text editor I can't see any funny characters, just a crlf at the end of each line.

 

any other ideas?

 

I have had the same problem with very large GEDCOM files, 10,000 KB or more. I have found that all I have to do is load it into WordPad (NotePad can only take a much smaller file and is limited in its abilities) and then save it back into the original file. I do not change the extension to .txt This has worked for me several times.

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I am currently trying to Import a Gedcom file into TMG, and it says it has a missing header.

The GEDCOM was created using the UTF-8 character set (UniCode). It needs to be converted to the ANSI character set before TMG can import it. PAF, for example, creates GEDCOMs in UTF-8 by default. To export from PAF for TMG import, the export settings need to be changed to 'Other GEDCOM 5.5' and to the ANSI character set.

 

I convert these GEDCOMs by opening them in Word (which will recognize the UTF-8) and then saving the GEDCOM as a text file (using the ANSI character set). You then need to check the filename and make sure that it ends in .GED rather than in .TXT.

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Thank's Jim. That sorted it. I couldn't find an ANSI character set, but US-ASCII worked just as well. It's now imported ok, and I can view the data.

 

So thanks everyone that responded.

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