AncestralFire · What we keep

What came back when we read a family file back, and what didn’t yet.

On 7 and 8 October we brought a public family file into AncestralFire, with a line changed for each case below, and read it back. The download is a GEDCOM 7 file that carries AncestralFire’s own header, so it is your file’s people and facts, not a byte-for-byte copy. This page is only what that reading showed.

What came back.

• “About”, “calculated” and “estimated” dates stayed apart, and were not tidied into each other.
• Dates in other calendars (Hebrew, French Republican) came back as written, with the calendar’s tag spelled the standard’s way (“HEBREW 3 TSH 5680”, from the file’s “@#DHEBREW@ 3 TSH 5680”).
• A family listed with a husband and wife but no marriage was shown as partners with no marriage recorded, not as a marriage.
• An adopted child kept both sets of parents, each marked as birth or adoptive.
• A name in another script kept its kind (a romanized form, for example).
• A person the file gave no sex was shown with none, and one given a sex was shown with it, as recorded.
• A witness at a marriage came back with their role.
• Another program’s own tags came back in the downloaded file and showed on the person’s record.
• A file full of “Living” placeholders was named as that when it came in, and the tree it replaced was set aside whole, so it could be brought back.

Not yet.

• Dates in other calendars are kept, but not yet put into words (“3 Tishrei 5680, Hebrew calendar”).
• A download that leaves out the people you choose is not offered. The file you download is your whole file.
• We are not checking these lines again on every release. Each one is what we saw on the day, and we will say so here when we read them again.

Have a file? Open it free: it is read in your browser, so you can look it over before you bring it in. Not sure how to get your file out of another program? Here are its own steps.