Basic Help Questions (importing Ancestry hyphen format dates; 'Unknown' gender search)

Help
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Hi - a couple of very basic questions if I may. I am attempting some cleanup in Ancestry and using Gramps as a way to view details. My questions are:

  1. In Ancestry the default date format for all events is: DD-MM-YYYY, eg 10 Jan 1900. I believe I have some dates in Ancestry in the form of MM-DD-YYYY, eg January 10, 1900. Where would I go in the Gramps UI to view all dates in that form so I may update them?

  2. Where in Gramps would I look to make sure all genders are appropriate and that I do not have any “unknowns”?

Thanks!
v. AIO64-5.1.6-1

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Ik know two tricks:

  1. Choose the event view, and sort all events by date. You will then see empty dates first, then all dates that Gramps does not fully understand, and then the ones that are OK. I often use that trick, because some sites, like FamilySearch, also put the word DECEASED in dates.

  2. Download RootsMagic Essentials, which is free, and let that download your tree from Ancestry. It will normalize most dates, and when you export a GEDCOM from that, and switch off all of RootsMagic’s own GEDCOM extensions, the resulting GEDCOM is better than a direct export from Ancestry. RootsMagic can also download all pictures (media) with that tree.

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Go to the menu >> Edit >> Preferences. On the Display tab you can set the format for displayed dates.

If Gramps notices something unusual in the stored date information, the date will be displayed in bold italics.

Gramps builds an index of genders/sex based upon what the user sets as the gender as you enter the person’s information. Enter a person named “John” and tell Gramps the person is Male, entering another person named “John” will default his gender as Male. The index is built upon an import of a tree.

In the People, or Grouped People, views you can filter the list of people by Gender. An Unknown gender will give you a list of these people. Choosing Male or Female will give a list of these people. Are they correctly assigned male or female? That is for you to decide.

To scan a filtered list of names given the gender Female can be done. It is for you, the user, to determine if the information is correct.

A Tip: set the displayed name (in Preferences, Display tab) to Given Surname will allow you to sort the list of names by their given names.

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In the screen capture, the title of the Gender column has been clicked twice. The 1st click sorted alphabetically from smallest to largest. (in the order: female, male, other, unknown) The 2nd click reversed the sort order to put "unknown"s at the top.

Limiting the records shown in the view is done with the “Filter” Gramplet in the sidebar of the People view. The sidebar at the right show the default gramplet: the “Filter” gramplet. In that, clicking the Gender shows a pop-up menu where you can select “unknown”. Clicking the Find button actually applies the filter selections.

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Thank you extremely helpful! I do have a followup on my Date question. I would like to make sure all dates show up as DD MON YYYY. If I have a date in Ancestry which just happens to be Day Month Year and I set the display as noted will Gramps flag those which are “incorrectly” formatted so I may go in and fix them?

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Thank you this was extremelyt helpful. For some reason in my Gedcom file downloaded from Ancestry there were ~10 which had unknown gender but when I went into Ancestry they were properly identified. I re-saved them and hopefully that will update the gedcom file.

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Wrt RootsMagic - I worked with that software and was not a big fan. I am now running FTM and I’m happy with that. I’m using Gramps as I find it a bit easier to look at specific items I want to “fix” such as gender and date formats. I also like the simplicity of the UI. Thanks for the help.

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The date format is a preference setting.

  • YYYY-MM-DD (ISO) is the Gramps default

On my Gramps, I always change this to the format you mentioned: DAY MON YEAR*

Applying this change requires restarting Gramps.

Note that there are several discussions with script for the SuperTool addon for re-parsing the ambiguous DD-MM-YYYY versus MM-DD-YYYY.

You can have 2 scripts and select which Events have a script applied to it. Still requires human judgment … but you can select a bunch and apply a script instead of doing them one-by-one.

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OK, I get that, but why don’t you use a GEDCOM exported from that? I mentioned RootsMagic, because the Ancestry GEDCOMs are pretty awful, and a RootsMagic export based on the same tree, downloaded from Ancestry, is much cleaner.

For standard dates, a GEDCOM export should always use the DD MON YYYY format, and Ancestry often messes that up, even for dates that were correct when I uploaded them.

I am hoping that FTM does the same, and exports GEDCOMs in the proper format.

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Thanks. I suppose I could but I had not thought of that to be honest. When I started using Gramps it was based on a downloaded GEDCOM file from Ancestry and up to now I have been working with that. I had assumed that as GEDCOM is a standard that all would follow a standardized format and one GEDCOM would not have been better than another - based on your comments that would be an inaccurate assumption.

In terms of date format - I know for a fact that I will have in Ancestry dates formatted as “Day Month Year” and I am trying to use a tool to identify those. One thing I noticed in using Gramps was that if the setting is “Day Month Year” in Preferences → Display ->Date Format, Gramps will always format the date as indicated. I have now shifted to “DAY MON YEAR” in the hopes that any incorrectly formatted dates in Ancestry will be identified but it now sounds that the GEDCOM will always format to DAY MON YEAR irrespective as to what may actually be in Ancestry so it seems that any tool using a GEDCOM would never identify that situation for me.

Thanks for the reply.

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I can understand that you did not expect this, but I just did a test with my own tree, and found dozens of bad dates in the GEDCOM file, which all had long month names in English, like June. And in GEDCOM, month names should always be 3 upper case letters, in English. That means that when I enter oktober, or 10, a proper GEDCOM export must write OCT, and nothing else.

Most software can do this, so that it can store proper dates, meaning dates that comply with our (local) settings, in some standardized format, which you don’t see, except when you look inside the database, or in Gramps XML. And that means, that when your Gramps is configured to recognize 6/17/2024, it will store that as real date, and export that as 17 JUN 2024. It will also change the way it’s displayed when you change settings, after a restart.

This mechanism only works when Gramps can recognize the date, and if it does not, like when you add a text like ‘not sure’, it will not store it as a date, but as text. And you can recognize such a date in many views, because it’s shown in bold. Bad dates also don’t sort like real dates in the event view, which is an easy way to find them. When you sort that by date, the sorting shows empty dates first, then the bad ones, followed by all the good ones, and that’s why I can tell you that the Ancestry export had dozens of them.

When I downloaded the same tree with RootsMagic, and did the export with that, there was only one bad date left, and that was one with some extra text, so it was a bad date indeed.

I just made a test tree on Ancestry, where I had to enter dates as mm/dd/yyyy, and they were displayed as dd mmm yyyy in the tree, with English month names. And that suggest that Ancestry can recognize things, so it does not necessarily mean that any date entered in that way is wrong.

Anyway, in the end, the fastest way to find out, at least for me, is to sort the events by date, so that the bad dates are all shown on one page, or some more.

And hopefully, FTM is just as smart as RootsMagic.

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Thank you very much for your considered and informed reply.

One thing which I have noticed in Ancestry is that from a display perspective it is very easy when importing data into the tree (Census, FindAGrave) that those dates will be in the MM-DD-YYYY format. Unless when doing this import the user is mindful to make the change Ancestry is very wysiwyg in that it will take whatever the date format is upon the import and that is how it will be displayed in their UI. Indeed, you can mouse over Ancestry will prompt with the proper DD-MM-YYYY format and when selected will be properly entered for display

My objective was to try and determine in Ancestry whether I have any dates formatted in the MM-DD-YYYY format and manually correct them. I can assure you that in my tree there is no text that has been entered into any date fields and if the date is empty Ancestry will display it visually as “Unknown” but upon export will simply be blank.

I followed your guidance in terms of the sorting but it seems as if the date is getting normalized by Ancestry when the GEDCOM is created - because there are zero errors :slightly_smiling_face:. That said I know just as a matter of course that I more than likely upon adding information to the tree missed properly formatting the date for visual display and it are those which I’m trying to find.

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