Automatic Wife Creation? Sounds like a tabloid Newspaper....

CNDH · Post by **CNDH** » Sat Apr 28, 2012 2:16 pm

It seems that iFamily has created a huge number of wives for those ancestors whose wives remained unknown. I now have 284 wives all called "Wife of....." and given an ID number in the 888889 range.

Where is this setting? At what point does the system create "her" as I've really only just noticed.
This topic is linked to my other one of "Living" ancestors as the creation of these unknown wives have caused me problems once exported and uploaded to websites.
When the system does create the wife, can it also kill her off?! Loads of 14th, 15th, 16th century men have now got their wives still living.

How can a quickly enter them all as dead? Or is it that I will have to go through each one?

I, of course, would be delighted for my wife to live forever and I heartedly wish it so, but I understand that there are limits.

Regards

Charles Home

CNDH · Post by **CNDH** » Sat May 05, 2012 3:38 pm

Well, judging by the lack of response, it seems that I am the only person that has experienced this "Wife Creation".

I want to try and find out at what point these wives were created and by what program if it is not iFamily.

I started using iFamily at the end of last year when I finally broke away from Microsoft and got myself an iMac. I had been using Legacy up until then and so I imported the GEDCOM into iFamily. Could it have happened then?

Since I've been with iFamily, I naturally have been adding new people and the database is now just over 4000 strong, with some branches going back to the 12th Century. For a lot of my early ancestors, I only had the male's name and sometimes only a death date. Very few of them had entries of the wife.
I've noticed that all the imported people have a normal range of ID numbers starting with 1 (my son) (created presumably by Legacy) and continuing up to 3108 when I left Legacy and Microsoft.All people added since using iFamily are all numbered with an eight-digit number. The first one is numbered 88888889 and the first person I entered on iFamily was numbered 88889134. Then there were more "Wives of" until another manually entered person numbered 88889187. So, purely chronologically, it would appear that it started to create these wives as soon as I started with iFamily. There are a couple of instances where there are "Husband of...."

Since December, I have been exporting GEDCOMs to my family site on Tribalpages.com to share with family.

I have now noticed that every early ancestor who had not got a wife on the system before has now got a wife called "Wife of (husband's name)"
This is on iFamily. Do you think it happened when I exported to GEDCOM?
There are over 250 of them. I can't think of how it has happened. If it was not on iFamily but on Tribalpages, then I would look there, but it is on iFamily too and I have not imported any GEDCOM since the initial one.

Am I really the only one who has experienced this?

Regards

Charles

Post by **Warwick Wilson** » Sat May 05, 2012 11:53 pm

Hi Charles,

Sorry for the lack of reply, I was waiting to see if any others may have the same problem. I am hands off as far as I can be on the forums.

Email me the Gedcom and I will have a look at it's structure to determine if the problem lies with the export or the import part of the process. If it is iFamily's import we would be able to add an exclusion. By the sound of it the family records may be malformed, which if proven correct would require an email to the generators support.

Many Thanks,
Warwick.
support@ifamilyformac.com

CNDH · Post by **CNDH** » Sun May 06, 2012 10:13 pm

Thanks Warwick

It's winging its way to you now.

Regards

Charles

Post by **Warwick Wilson** » Sun May 20, 2012 9:19 am

Charles,

After finally getting the chance to search through and email and take a look at the codebase, I can say that this 'feature' has been present since the early Version 2.022.

I've had a deeper look at our codebase. I can find only two possible circumstances where iFamily may create a person with a "Wife of..." name. One is upon load of a Gedcom while processing a FAMS record and the identity of a person is not present. (ie: there was no INDI record for the specified spouse in the FAMS family record.). The second is a more remote possibility in the Merge functionality and can most likely be discounted.

With the Gedcom you initially imported from, can i enquire which other program it came from? The first 20 or so lines of the Gedcom should contain some header info which will allow you to tell. Alternately, iFamily may have stored the information and you can access it by choosing Reports->Metadata from Gedcom Load from the iFamily menus.

With regards to the numbering, that is an altogether more interesting quandary which might only be solved by reloading the original at my end. It seems that when iFamilys' Gedcom importer encountered the first of the FAMS records in error, it believed that the last person loaded had an id of 88888888, eight eights! Subsequently the unidentified person was inserted as 88888889, and the loader continued the counting from there. Initially I can see 3102 people in your Gedcom who were loaded correctly - then I count 315 people who encountered the FAMS error and were automatically assigned a name and 758 who were then identified correctly, all of whom are also in this high ID number range.

So I am keen to see the original Gedcom, to find out both which program wrote it and if the structure can be salvaged upon load. (I could offer a Gedcom load option to suppress the creation of missing spouses whilst loading FAMS records, or I could automate that option of the Gedom source program is 'xxx'.).

Thanks,
Warwick Wilson.

Kathy LPV · Post by **Kathy LPV** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 5:34 am

Hi all,
I don't mind having a wife for someone I haven't found yet ... but there are 2 other "automatic wife's that don't make sense:
1. a child, i.e. under the "marrying age" - don't we all have some of these?
2. a lifelong bachelor or bachelorette! (& can you delete the wife for him or her?) I & surely many have several of these!

So far I L O V E this program ... no problems, iFamily is one of the very few programs that allow me to list both my Mom's "Natural" & "Adoptive" parents (& in my notes I state that she was never "Legally" adopted.)
Thanks Warwick for creating this program...

PS - how do I "reregister" on another mac?