Sunday 18 August 2013

Family Tree Analyzer application

The latest Lost Cousins monthly newsletter http://lostcousins.com/newsletters/aug13news.htm by Peter Calver recommended an application that we can run over a GEDCOM file to find out all sorts of interesting facts and statistics about our families, such as a list of families ranked by how many children the parents had. My record is 19 children, although I'm aware of other people's families with many more than that, especially of there has been more than one marriage. These 19 were all from one couple. I bet she was tired!!

Anyway, I downloaded the app from http://ftanalyzer.codeplex.com and uploaded a copy of my latest GEDCOM file for it to scan. Lots of error codes come up, but apparently that's normal. The errors I AM interested in were where I had stuffed up and added people to my tree (or got a bit click-happy on Ancestry) where the dates don't fit, eg where a child was born more than 9 months after it's father died, if a child was born before the mother or father was 13, those aged over 120 years old at their death (highly unlikely!), and other errors that are physical impossibilities. Out of the 3000+ people in my file I have 51 issues to address and fix.

Give it a try and see what interesting things you come up with in your own family.

PS Sorry, can't make the web links work tonight. Tomorrow's problem :)

2 comments:

  1. Sounds interesting. What genealogy software do you use? I'm wondering if it has some of the features you mention.

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    Replies
    1. Jill, I use FTM on my PC, but mainly via Ancestry so it links straight to FTM & they're in sync. I doubt Ancestry picks up errors like these, & I don't do the actual entering into FTM to notice them, seeing as it syncs with Ancestry when I tell it to do so.

      Today's task is to check on FTM if I can enter 2 vaguely related people's names & see what their relationship is to each other. I can easily see what they are to me, but it would be helpful to be able to enter someone who isn't me as one of the relatives.

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