Miscellenea Edintone

Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies in conjunction with Queen Mary College has launched the Dissenting Academies Project.  It provides databases of academies in the 17th-19th centuries, principals, tutors, students and a “virtual” composite academies library from this period.

http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html

It is a huge resource of information on this topic and period but also provides a starting point for future research.

The earliest dissenting academies were established after the Restoration as a result of the 1662 Act of Uniformity, and were intended to provide Protestant students dissenting from the Church of England with a higher education similar to that at Oxford and Cambridge, from which they were largely excluded. Their main purpose was to prepare candidates for the ministry, but many educated lay students as well. They played a crucial role in ministerial and lay education: the tutors and the students they educated contributed in fundamental ways to the development of ideas, notably in the fields of theology, philosophy, literature, and science. In the nineteenth century the academies’ original purpose to provide a higher education was largely superseded by the founding of London and the provincial universities, which were open to dissenters, and by the eventual reform of Oxford and Cambridge.

GEDaRHIZ is an French program developed by Jacques Louvel

It is described in English here http://pagesperso-orange.fr/jacques.louvel/chrest/gedarhiz_eng.htm

To obtain a copy of the Excel workbook you need to subscribe to the program’s Yahoo Group http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/gedarhiz/ The program is free and is documented in English and French.  In the Group home page select Fichiers.  First read the explanations in 2_explanations.htm and download the Excel version  ged2rhiz.exe from 3_ged2rhiz.

Here is a French program TransGed which can be downloaded here http://www.visuged.org/chargetg.php3

Here is a ”knife and fork” method http://www.tedpack.org/text2ged.html using Word and Excel is described by Ted Pack.

Using Fix2Ged.  Fix2Ged is a DOS program written by the LDS Family History Department in 1993, but still works.

This utility was developed so that the user could use a grammar pattern file to describe the fixed field (field delimited) input file, as well as defining the appropriate GEDCOM structure in which the specified fixed fields are to be mapped.  This program will not provide linkage of relationships.

The Fixed Field to GEDCOM Conversion Utility uses a GEDCOM processor and a GEDCOM grammar pattern file to convert the field delimited file into a GEDCOM output. The fields in the field delimited input file are usually variable length, separated by a field delimiter, but they can fixed length as specified by the GEDCOM grammar pattern file.

The GEDCOM Processor reads in the input fixed file and parses the record into fields as specified by the define record structure from the GEDCOM grammar file.  The GEDCOM portion of the grammar file is traversed to determine the mapping from the fixed field input file to the desired GEDCOM output structure.  Function call directives are placed within the GEDCOM grammar file to initiate this mapping.  The GEDCOM processor will call these functions to retrieve the fixed field values and then places them in the GEDCOM output structures.  The output structure is written when all of the nodes in the GEDCOM pattern file have been visited and populated with the fields from the input file.  (Details from PAF Review)

The program can be downloaded from http://pac-its.psu.edu/genealogy/gedcom/demo.zip.  The program and documentation is contained ion the zip file.

GedTool is a collection of Excel macros for processing of GEDCOM files.  All functions are started from a common menu interface.  With GedTool all fields from a GEDCOM file can be converted into an Excel file.  Once in Excel, they will be changed and written back.   The same process can be used for creating a completely new Gedcom from and Excel worksheet in various layouts.   The program is written by Peter Schulz and works in both English and German.

It can be obtained by emailing Peter is is available as shareware with a one month trial version. Details here  http://www.genealogienetz.de/misc/software/hilfsprogramme/gedtool.html and http://wiki-de.genealogy.net/

Using Ancestor Access.

Ancestor Access is an Access database that is compliant with the Gedcom 5.5 standard.  VBA code is included as a module to create a Gedcom from the database.  The file was available for download from http://home.att.net/~douglas.parrish/home.htm but is not currently available.  If you cannot locate a copy please contact me.

Using SmartGenealogy,  from http://alainlecomte.free.fr/Download.htm#SmartGenealogy. You will need to set your spreadsheet up first, but it does get you from Excel to SmartGenealogy and thence from there exported to Gedcom in easy non technical steps.

The best way to do this is:

1. Import an existing Gedcom into SmartGenealogy

2. Export it to Excel

3. Adapt your new data into the format of the Excel sheet you have created

4. Import your new data into a new SmartGenealogy database

5. Finally, export to Gedcom

Using excel2ged-family, an Excel spreadsheet template including VBA macros to create the Gedcom file.  This method also has the ability to import relationships.  It can be downloaded from http://www.godskingsandheroes.info/software/Excel2GEDv1.0-family.zip