Census2Ged: My New Program

I was thinking about how I could get past some brick walls in my research using neighbors to my relatives. I ended up transcribing several census pages into Genscriber and then entering everyone on them into my genealogy program as neighbors on a shared census event. However, this was tedious and took way more time than I could reasonably afford it. So I started to think about how I could use my programming knowledge to solve the problem. I wanted to be able to create trees organically using censuses while preserving nuclear family relationships. 3 days ago I started working on Census2Ged. It only works with the 1900 census as of now, but I hope to extend its functionality to other censuses in the future. This post will show you how to use it and what it produces. And, of course, you can download it for free at this link: https://sourceforge.net/projects/census2ged/

Features:

These are the features currently supported in Census2Ged:

• Works with the 1900 US census (and in the next update it will work with all censuses from 1850-1940) 
• Conforms to gedcom 5.5 Standards
• Preserves relationships between heads of the family, wives, and their children
• Records first and last names in correct fields
• Records Race and sex
• Records birth month and birth year
• Records approximate year married
• Records how many children they have living and how many are dead
• Records year of immigration and naturalization information
• Records Occupation
• Records Literacy information
• Records Property information

It does not yet support linking stepchildren, parents of heads, or other non-standard relationships.

A completed individual file looks like this:

And the resulting family for this individual looks like this:

Notice how both the husband and wife have the same surname. This is something I will have to fix in future updates.

To use the program simply navigate to where you downloaded the program to and click 'Ged2Census1900.exe' You will be lead to a screen that looks like this:

Simply enter the name for your file and click ok. You will then be able to choose the 1900 census csv to make a gedcom out of. Nothing will pop up to say its done (i'll probably fix that in the future) but you will find your final gedcom in the same folder as Ged2Census.exe. You can then import it into your genealogy program of choice.

If you find this tool useful then I certainly would not mind if you donate a few dollars to my paypal account. It motivates me to keep developing more tools and since I will be starting college in 2019 I will need every dollar I can get!