Add more date formats

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Keith Wilson
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Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Add more date formats

Post by Keith Wilson » Sun Oct 21, 2007 4:36 am

Originally posted by jasmuth

It would be great if iFamily could understand more date formats.

Some of the data found by searching in www.Ancestry.com uses yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy-mm format.

It would also be nice to understand spellings of months that don't have exactly the first 3 letters.

Here are 3 examples of dates that were not understood as dates and ended up in one of
the " Notes" fields instead.

1770-09
1734-01-15
23 April 1925

My tree has hundreds of these types of dates. Fixing them all by hand would be a big job.

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Keith Wilson
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Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Add more date formats

Post by Keith Wilson » Sun Oct 21, 2007 5:28 am

iFamily does not discard dates that it cannot understand in a Gedcom file - it saves them in a special field for later use.

After importing into iFamily for Tiger then I suggest that you use menu option Events - Dates where you can sort the list of events and apply various additional date format rules, such as yyyy-mm-dd.

It is annoying that some genealogy applications generate Gedcom files that contain dates that do not conform to the Gedcom 5.5 Standard - this Standard has been around, unchanged, for 12 years - surely long enough to have been read a large number of times. I could name the worst offenders but the one you mentioned ranks near the top of my list. If you are having this sort of problem then I suggest that you also send an email to the company that generated the Gedcom file.

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Keith Wilson
Site Admin
Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 2:12 pm

Add more date formats

Post by Keith Wilson » Sun Oct 21, 2007 7:08 am

Originally posted by jasmuth

The Events-Dates option to fix dates was just what I needed. Thanks for pointing it out.

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