By Ian Sewell
This article was published in the December 2015 edition of Soul Search, the Journal of The Sole Society
I recently went on a course for Family Historian the software package used by the societies Research Coordinators, where more detailed issues could be explained and dealt with. In reality most of my issues with this software are still outstanding and I will have to fight an on going battle to get it to do what I want especially in the area of charts. However one small thing that was shared was the definition of one field which was tree number. Apparently the software keep an internal record of the number of trees that exists in your data and assigns a number to it. To see this numbers you simply define a new field as “=RelationPool()”. This is very useful as it immediately identifies any orphaned records as they will be in their own tree and for those of us with files containing more than one tree we can see if all members of the tree we have defined are actually in the same tree. A useful thing to have and if anyone has problems with this drop me a line and I will try to help.
One other question I had that was not resolved was the arguments about keeping data in a GEDCOM or Family Historian Project (FHP). For those of you with the software you will be aware that the program seems to work in both formats and so what is best? The answer is — it depends. GEDCOM keeps your data together but FHP allows some features to work better especially when it comes to linking to the web and such. I will continue to use a mixture at the moment and let you know if I find anything else.