Month: October 2011

Since it is so hard to communicate through blog comments when you are trying to get your point across, I’m putting this post up to show what I get when I try to import a GEDCOM file into my copy of Family Tree Maker 2012. I’m just trying to help the information process, so that everyone involved can get a better picture of what is happening. Poor Russ Worthington is trying to help, but is probably more frustrated then anyone involved.

I didn’t even realize I had this issue, until I was reading my blog reader this morning and stumbled across Randy Seaver’s ongoing “adventures”. This is basically me saying, “ME TOO!”

Here is my process, to show my re-creation:

This shows that my 3rd Great Grandfather, William H Moore, has a census image attached to his birth citation. There are other images attached to him that you can see in the middle media column of the fact page on the right. However, we only need to see that there is actually media present in the file. Also please excuse the really crazy address citations there. I’ve since condensed them into a better looking format.

Next I exported a selective file. I chose only my direct ancestral line and I made sure to “Include media files”.

I have done this step with both ANSI and UTF-8 character sets. The same result both times.

Next I did Russ’ recommended step of searching the gedcom for jpg links. Nothing there, so I knew there would be no links when I imported. For the sake of documentation I’ll carry on.

I imported the gedcom file into a new Family Tree Maker file. You can see that there are no multimedia links present.

Here is William H Moore’s new fact page in the new Family Tree Maker file. Notice how the media column is all zeros. This tells us there are no links to any present or missing media.

Here is my lonely, empty Media section.

Like I told Russ in his post, I merely tried to re-create Randy’s problem out of curiosity. I often do this when I see people are having some sort of issue in software. I’m not a computer programmer, I’m not a particulary smart person. I’ve just always loved messing with things and getting them to work. So this started as an experiment (I do many) to see if I could re-create Randy’s exact problem. Sometimes I might notice where someone missed a step or set something wrong and can even help, (not often, I ain’t no genius, that’s my brother, HA).

So here’s a second example of the problem Randy is experiencing. In a normal import, there should be something in the media section showing that there are missing media files, not the images themselves, but links. I always understood that. I was just flabbergasted that my file had none of those links! I’ve had those in previous versions of Family Tree Maker, so I know them when I see them.

Am I completely a geek when I say that this was a very fun way to spend an afternoon for me? Even if I did have to do laundry and make pudding too.