Genealogy Chat

Hi,

Has anyone else lost their marriage data when Exporting gedcom files from GR?

I recently discovered that having exported my tree into FTM2005 all of my marriage data had been reduced to dd mmm - and that the all important year data was missing!!!

Having just updated some of the year data in the 'new improved' GR, I have tried to re-export it to see if the same problem is happening. Guess what? Yes, yet again I've lost the data.

I don't think it's a problem with Family Tree Maker, after all, it's worked perfectly well in the past. I think it's a problem with GR - possibly to do with the current changes?

If anyone else has lost data, I'd be interested to hear. To restore my tree is an enormous problem as I have c15,200 names on it.

Simon

Simon, I exported my GEDCOM from my GR tree a couple of weeks ago and found that all the baptism dates have years of 0000. They are shown correctly on my GR tree, but are zeroes in the GEDCOM file (I opened it using Notepad to view it, so I know it is not a problem with FTM). One or two marriage dates have been affected in my GEDCOM too, but my main problem is with baptism dates. I posted up a thread asking if anybody else had the same problem but it seems the other people who have this problem have been inputting the date into their tree in the wrong format, e.g. 15th June 1868 or something like that instead of 15/06/1868. I know my problem isn't that because I had exported my GEDCOM the previous month and it was fine, and I hadn't changed most of the records in the meantime! I've reported it to GR and they said they would pass it onto their technical team, but I haven't heard any more.

In the meantime, I am still working through the thousands of records in my GEDCOM putting the years back into the baptism dates. It's taking ages because I'm having to look at the old copy of my tree to see what they should be. I'm about 3 quarters of the way through. When I've finished, I'm going to load it into FTM and never ever use GR to do any tree-building again!

Kate.

I dont think the marriage data loss is a new thing with GR.
I had issues with it times many in the past.

So now when ever I do any changes to GR I also do the same changes offline in my FTM tree. Its the only sure way to keep what you have safe. I do however keep regular exports of my tree from genes, but only if I ever need to restore it to genes for any reason.

I think its the way you enter dates in GR that causes the problem when transferring it to FTM. I think for example you have to enter today's date as 11/12/2008 not 11 dec 2008.

There is a longstanding problem with marriage data where you enter the date and place of the marriage at the same time as adding the spouse to your GR tree, and the next time you open your tree the date and place have gone, but in this case it seems it is only the year that has disappeared so it sounds as though it may be connected to my baptism date problem, unless of course Simon has entered all the marriage dates in the wrong format.

OMG! Thanks for those replies... I've just looked at some of the Baptismal dates and see that, yes, they too have become corrupted. I have been tending to be, I guess, lazy, and simply dragged and dropped data from IGI straight into GR for the Baptismal location and date. It's simple, easy and quick... but, as you've pointed out, I now have a huge number of dates showing dd mmm 0000.

This never used to happen! What have they done to our GR??? and more to the point, why have they done it???

Actually, come to think of it, I believe that even where I've put the baptismal date in the 'correct' format, I think that FTM has changed it into dd mmm yyyy format. But, previously, it has been reimported to GR without any data loss.

I rely entirely on GR as a - usually - excellent means of collating my tree. With 9,341,033 members (as they say on the Home page) each paying £9.00 sub, that's an enormous amount of ££ they could be putting into resolving these problems. £84 MILLION by my reckoning - and that's without their advertising revenue.

Have you reported the problem to GR, Simon? I would think the more complaints about it they get, the more likely they are to do something to fix it. What I find particularly baffling is that I looked at the downloader version number given at the top of each GEDCOM and it doesn't seem to have changed between my October download, which was o.k., and my November one, which has the zero years in the baptism dates.

Oh dear, I've got about 5/6 of the way through fixing my GEDCOM and now I've reached the marriages -I thought only a few of them were affected but it looks as though it may be all of them too! It'll take me ages to correct all those, and it's not as easy to look them up on the old GEDCOM as the baptisms were because it doesn't have the names near them. This is so annoying!

Yes, Kate,

I did contact GR about the dates problem and got this answer:

"I am really sorry but we are unable to restore an old version of your tree. Once you have loaded a new gedcom this over-writes any previosu versions.

"In January though we are looking at ways of standardising the dates in trees."

So, I hope that 'standardising' means making all of the dates fields alphanumeric - and long enough to take full months names for people who want to fo it that way...

Simon, are the dates messed up in your tree on GR? Did you upload a new GEDCOM file to your GR tree? Or have they misunderstood what your problem is? Because with my tree, the dates look o.k. on my GR tree but are just messed up on the exported GEDCOM file.

Kate,

Yes, it's my tree in GR that has become messed up since I re-imported it from FTM. I hadn't realised that it had become corrupted while I exported it - it was oly once I'd got it back into GR that I spotted the problem - so I pointed out the problem and asked if they could restore it from a previous date - assuming they held a backup file of some sort.

I've done a bit of experimenting since and found that it really is the export stage that corrupts the file. I corrected some dates in GR, then exported it and saved it but didn't open it into FTM but simply re-imported it to GR and the new data was corrupt. So I don't think that FTM is the problem. I think it's to do with some change that GR has made - prior to the recent revamp.

I have an FTM file dated 30 September which has uncorrupted data in it that I could work from - but that means I have lost the past two months worth of work - and I've added c1000 names in that period - as well as a whole stack of Census and other notes.

GR - Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Hello Everybody,

I have the same problem with 0000 dates, which is why I have been searching this forum today. I have already made some detailed comments on the thread "Dates on Downloaded Gedcom" which can be found here http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards.asp?wci=thread&tk=1107463&px=1.

In summary, I have the same problems as Simon with my marriage and baptism dates, but I would also advise checking for a specific issue with all dates, including those for births and deaths.

Where only the month and year of an event is known, and this was entered into GR as mm/yyyy, then the Gedcom file now records this as 01/mm/yyyy. In effect, you need to verify all events that are currently showing as having occurred on the 1st day of the month.

Regards,

Philip Clarke

I don't understand this, have I a need to worry about it?

Margaret

Yes I have the same problem all my marriage years are missing, not the day & month, I always put ie- 01/01/1901, if I have only inputted the year that is ok, also Baptism years are missing, this is definateley a problem with GR since as on previous down loads it has been ok.

Have just sent GR a message, will let you know if & when I get a reply

Re missing dates on Ged Coms I have sent another message to GR. The problem has still not been resolved & I had no reply from my 1st message, don't they even look at our e-mails ??

I haven't heard any more since the original reply I got back in November last year, Jean. So don't hold your breath waiting!

I've just written to the Helpline saying...

"I wrote to you a while ago about problems I was having with exporting dates from GR to Family Tree Maker 2005.

"At that time dates in the format dd mmm yyyy were being exported as dd mmm - with the year completely missing. I now have a somewhat different situation in that I have converted most of my dates in GR to the format dd/mm/yyyy but they are being exported as dd mmm yyyy.

"I have just exported my Gedcom and opened it in Notepad and find they are in this same format, for example 13 JUL 1784 instead of 13/07/1784 which is what it says in GR.

"Furthermore, I have found a number of dates such as 27/12/1848 have been exported as 27 Dec 2009...!!!

"What on earth is going on?"

With 16,000 plus names in my tree this is a huge problem as I need to make changes in Family Tree Maker that cannot be made in GR but if I re-import to GR I know that all my date data will be corrupted.

Basically its a total Cr*p tree prog please don't ever rely on it for holding all your data gedcom always seems to get corrupted, when uploading it puts any residences in the Baptismal sources!. Have your main tree on your PC at home and upload to here, that way it doesn't matter when it messes up your Data. As for the DATES problem, this is because the international standard for date input is DD/MMM/YYYY this is because using a date of 11/02/1958 is meaningless in the big wide world as in UK that would be 11 Feb 1958 and In U.S. amongst others it would be 2 Nov 1958 the GR tree being Cr*p should not let you enter dates as DD/MM/YYYY but it does.