Thanks Tom. If I can just add a bit more to expand on what we’ve both said(!) And I’ve been arguing with FH Support on a number of bugs for the last few days, so I’ll add that in too. FH swear by GEDCOM in their advertising, and as Tom found, FH Help says: "Family Historian was designed from the ground up, to be 100% GEDCOM-compatible, and 100% GEDCOM-complete. You do not have to convert Family Historian files to the GEDCOM format. They already are in the GEDCOM format." That is exactly what I found – my TMG data (6100 people), after using the ‘direct import’ feature of FH (which they recommend over a GEDCOM transfer from TMG) ended up in FH in a 4.6MB GEDCOM file. FH has an Autosave feature you can set to save every X minutes (defaults to 5) – I haven’t noticed any issues while I have been playing with it. Guess there might be delays for those with 100,000 people in their TMG files though. The FH Preferences also include loading options to “Exclude other applications extensions to GEDCOM”, “Exclude fields that are not valid for GEDCOM 5.5” and “Convert known Family Tree Maker/Ancestry extension tags” – those, of course would only apply to pure GEDCOM imports. Just as RM folks apply edits to the SQLite database directly, you can, obviously, edit the FH GEDCOM file yourself – at the risk of creating something it will spit out of course. Now, to more interesting stuff – I noticed in playing with some charts, that multiple marriages often weren’t displaying in date order, and children weren’t showing in birthdate order. FH Support eventually owned up to the problem: FH displays stuff in the order they were CREATED in the original sending program (guess in the order they are in the GEDCOM file, i.e. in individual’s record-ID order) – even though it shows the events (Facts) in its Facts list for an individual in date order. You need to apply FH’s ‘Re-order’ function to sort it out, and they said ‘OK, we’ll do an auto-re-order when we do a TMG import’. I said ’No, that means any Tags in TMG that have a Sort-date only will end up out of sequence, as you don’t have any concept of Sort-date in FH’ (they do get flushed to the END of the FH Facts list). They came back with a dumb response on that one, which says to me that they don’t have any idea of what Sort-date is or does. I’m not going to waste any more time playing with it until their promised Witness/Role function comes out, but I don’t have high hopes for it. Nor for RM’s direct import feature, given that that has been promised for years without delivery. But without those 2 major changes, neither program is worth thinking about – just my opinion. Don Ferguson From: Tom Holden [mailto:ve3meo@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, 4 September 2014 11:52 PM To: Don Ferguson; tmg-refugees@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [TMG-REFUGEES] Family Historian (update) I have added some comments interspersed in your message below, confined to GEDCOM and RootsMagic, with which I am familiar. I have not tried FH. Tom

> Now, to more interesting stuff – I noticed in playing with some charts, > that multiple marriages often weren’t displaying in > date order, and children weren’t showing in birthdate order. FH Support > eventually owned up to the problem: FH displays > stuff in the order they were CREATED in the original sending program > (guess in the order they are in the GEDCOM file, i.e. > in individual’s record-ID order) – even though it shows the events (Facts) > in its Facts list for an individual in date order. This is also a problem in RootsMagic, and RootsMagic users have been complaining about it for years to no avail. I wonder if RootsMagic will be any more responsive to émigrés from TMG than they have been to native RM users. Jerry