WHITNEY-L Archives

Archiver > WHITNEY > 1997-09 > 0873976216


From: "Stelmach, Debbie" <xbk0050%>
Subject: GEDCOM Compatibility
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 97 11:10:16 +0000


Here's a little background information about GEDCOM files in general.
Hope this clarifies some of the problems and confusion some folks have
encountered when importing their WHITNEY12.GED.

GEDCOM data is not 100% compatible with all genealogy programs in
existence which is why various people may be missing information or
getting exception errors. Such errors are to be expected.

There are some "industry standard" events such as birth, marriage, death
which are recognized by all genealogy programs and these should import
with little problem. There are other events which can be recorded in a
person's lifetime which may or may not be recognized by your genealogy
program. It depends upon how flexible your program is.

For instance, Family Origins lets the user customize the types of events.
I added an event called "Cemetery" which included fields to list the
cemetery name, date, and location. I also added an event called
"graduated" which includes name of school, date, and location. If I
were to create a GEDCOM file, it would include the cemetery and graduated
events. Others who import the GEDCOM would probably reject those items
because their program doesn't recognize cemetery or graduated.

Some genealogy programs will let you control what events are exported,
some don't. Some programs have options for placing unrecognized data
into note fields, others programs will create a file of rejects.

Different genealogy programs may also have various levels of success with
notes and sources for the same reasons. Others have options to not export
notes and sources.

This is an age-old dilema for people who do programming and data
processing and not just a genealogy problem. The sharing of information
across different computers and different programs will have various
degrees of success. Again, the level of industry-defined standards tend
to dictate how much or how little information is successfully
transferred.

In this case, knowing that you have the correct number of individuals and
correct number of families is a good indicator of how successful your
GEDCOM import was. You can also browse, edit, or print the GEDCOM file
with any standard text editor. Missing data can be manually entered as
needed (although humbug to do).

Experiment with your genealogy program to see what it does with stuff it
doesn't recognize. Check to see if there are import/export options.
There maybe features which you can play with which will increase the
amount of data it recognizes.

For those of you on Compuserve, the Roots forum has some library files
about GEDCOM. As I recall, there was at least one file which went into
some technical detail about how GEDCOM files work.

Hope this helps!

Debbie J Stelmach
Honolulu

This thread: