Tag Archive | Ahnentafel converter

Super Large Numbers Do Not Work in my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM Tool

Alert, there is a bug in my tool to convert text files to GEDCOMs: very large Ahnentafel numbers like “46406041600” will cause it to hang.

I will add code to ignore large numbers by May (end of this week). If you are a regular user of this tool, check this post for the update when the new feature is released.

Something must have changed on the collection of trees because I had three emails in the last week complaining that my tool hung and did not complete the conversion. In all cases, the Ahnentafel went up to extremely large numbers, so eliminating those last few lines fixed the problem

Here is an example of the last several lines of a file that did not work:

Here are the last few lines of the same file after removing the lines with very high numbers. This version worked.

Do you really need these people born in the 1200s? What is the probability that they even are actually your ancestors?

This appears to be some sort of limitation in either the storage space for the program or the number sizes. Thus I propose to modify the code to ignore ahnentafel numbers with more than seven digits and to have it tell you that it did that.

Any other ideas out there? Remember I make almost no money on this, just the occasional small thank you donation, so I am not looking for a solution that will take lots of my time.

Creating a GEDCOM from a text file

Aug17

The purpose of this post is to announce new features for my Ahnentafel list to GEDCOM Conversion Tool. The link for this new version is: https://kittymunson.com/dna/Ahnen2GEDv2.php
Once I am confident that it works as it should, the previous version will be replaced with this one.

So why would you want to use this tool?

One way to look for any ancestors you might share with a DNA match is to take a GEDCOM of their pedigree and add it to a copy of your genealogy database to see if there are any duplicate profiles. Other ways are to use DNA2Tree or GWorks (click either for those posts). Often I just visually scan a compact list of my match’s ancestors using the new feature at 23andme, WIKItree’s compact tree, or an Ahnentafel list. Unless, of course, Ancestry‘s ThruLines or MyHeritage’s Theory of Family Relativity have found the common ancestors for me already.

This is the Ancestry tree for the grandmother of my new South African cousins with Pedigree Thief

Did you know that you can get an Ahnentafel list of a person’s ancestors from almost any online family tree displayed in pedigree format via a Chrome add-on called, appropriately, Pedigree Thief?

Better yet, did you know that you can make a GEDCOM from an Ahnentafel list via my tool, Ahen2GEDcom. Click here for my old post about that.

Although my program was originally written to turn the output from DNArboretum and Pedigree Thief into a GEDCOM, some people have found more uses for it.

For example, you might have a document that your Uncle Fred made and you would prefer to use ‘replace all’ in a word processor to cutting and pasting each bit of information into a genealogy program or website. Or you might be collecting information from relatives via spreadsheets or google forms (which can make spreadsheets). Any plain text file can be used as input to my tool, including a CSV file, as long as it is formatted the way the program expects it.

Debbie Parker Wayne is using an online form to collect information for a project of hers, so she asked me if I could enhance my tool to add marriages and sources. I said, “Sure but it is not trivial and I charge more for programming than DNA work.” She said that her book was doing well and she could pay for this. So we did it.

A computer program like this needs the format to be exact in order for it to work. So here are the details.
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Text to GEDCOM Using my Ahnen2GED

Oct11

My Ahnentafel to GEDCOM converter, Ahnen2GED, apparently has more uses than I realized. It was initially written to convert the output of DNArboretum (a tool to create ahnentafels from Family Tree DNA trees) to a GEDCOM, but many people are using it to convert other text files as well. So I have enhanced Ahnen2GED to accept any date format that ends with a space followed by the four digit year, so for example 10 jan 1920. I also fixed the known problem where it did not work properly if the lines for the grandparents were not there.

The URL for my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM converter is:
https://kittymunson.com/dna/Ahnen2GEDcom.php

Below is the documentation of the format Ahen2GED expects. Hopefully this will help you create text files that will easily convert to GEDCOMs using my tool. Especially DNAgedcom.com users!

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Announcing my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM converter

Dec23

Thanks to the crowd funding and testing support of the DNAadoption community I was able to write a new tool. Now it’s ready, it’s free, and it’s online, which means it works for Mac users too. You upload a text file in ahnentafel format and it creates a GEDcom file for you to download (or cut and paste). It was written to convert the DNArboretum output but with some massaging can take any ahnentafel text file, I hope.

Here is the URL (or click the image below) for my Ahnentafel to GEDCOM converter: http://kittymunson.com/dna/Ahnen2GEDcom.php

In my previous blog post about the return of DNArboretum, I suggested that if ten people gave me $5 then I would write this tool. It was funded within 36 hours. Thank you all for the quick response.