I have found that the Description field on the Place of most events (e.g. Birth, Death, Burial) doesn’t transfer to either Ancestry of Family Tree Maker 2019 via GEDCOM export/import. It seems to be exported as a TYPE tag, but doesn’t seem to appear anywhere in Ancestry or Family Tree Maker 2019. Interestingly, text added to the Description field of a Burial event in Family Tree Maker 2029 appears on the same line as the BURI tag when exported to GEDCOM (rather than a separate TYPE tag) and imports into Gramps successfully.
I use the Description field to record more detailed information than might be in the Place. e.g. the Place might be a city, state, country; the Description might contain the street address, specific cemetery and grave location. Am I misusing these fields? Is there a better/more correct way I should be recording this info?
Exporting the description on the same line as the BURI tag would not be valid Gedcom so we don’t do this.
n BURI [Y|<NULL>] {1:1} g7:BURI
+1 TYPE <Text> {0:1} g7:TYPE
+1 <<INDIVIDUAL_EVENT_DETAIL>> {0:1}
When importing we attempt to recognise non-standard Gedcom in some common cases.
The TYPE tag should be used to further classify the event type. The Gedcom standard gives some examples:
Other descriptor values might include, for example,
“Stillborn” as a qualifier to BIRT (birth)
“Civil” as a qualifier to MARR (marriage)
“College” as a qualifier to GRAD (graduation)
“Oral” as a qualifier to WILL
Extra detail for a place could be achieved by adding more levels to the place hierarchy.
People use this field in different ways though. In the past it was often used to store a full event description of the form “Birth of John Smith”. There is still a tool to generate these descriptions.
Export point of view: Are these the attributes that are supposed to carry these gedcom qualifiers in Gramps? And if so, both in the events we see a User Events section which separates them from all the standard Gedcom events, as much in the attributes there is nothing of this kind. What must be used in Gramps (and how do we know) so that the attribute of an event is integrated as such in Gedcom, for example BIRT, TYPE Stillborn.
Import point of view: Or, in other words, if we import a Gedcom containing this information where (in what type of attribute) does Gramps store the information? In which attribute of the Birth event will the Stillborn information be stored?
Exporting pre-defined event types will give the following:
BURI
TYPE <description>
For custom events you will get:
EVEN <description>
TYPE <event_type>
The mapping between Gramps event types and the pre-defined Gedcom tags can be found in the libgedcom.py file. I think that all the Gramps types map to a tag except for the new Stillbirth type that we are adding in the next release. [see Stillbirth proposal]
The import should handle any Gedcom exported by Gramps and also some extra cases for other software. There is addition code to handle relationship types and nobility titles.