A Tool to Change the Way You Conduct Collateral Research (Census2Ged v2.1)

Table of Contents

1. Links 

2. Introduction

3. Wait, What is Collateral Research?

4. So, How Does Census2Ged Help With Collateral Research?

5. Installing Census2Ged

6. Prerequisites
7. Using Census2Ged
     a. Gedcom Name
     b. Country
     c. Census Year
     d. Sourcing
     e. Source List Name
     f. Everything Else in Sourcing
     g. United States Tags
     h. Swedish Household Examinations
     I. Swedish Household Examination Tags
8. Cleaning Up the Final Gedcoms

Links

1. Like Census2Ged? Consider sending a couple dollars to my PayPal to support its continued development: https://www.paypal.me/ReneeSchmidt

2. Census2Ged on Github: https://github.com/xXReneeXx/Census2Ged

3. Download Census2Ged: https://github.com/xXReneeXx/Census2Ged/releases/tag/v2.2

4. Join the Census2Ged user group on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1386416641488942/

Introduction

Eleven months ago I published version 1.0 of my software, Census2Ged. It was buggy, had no customizability, and had an appearance reminiscent of the dark days where graphic design and software had an oppositional relationship.

Census2Ged 1.0

I am happy to announce that those days of visual and operational vulgarity are now over, thanks to the advent of the latest version, Census2Ged v2.1.

Census2Ged 2.1

The functional differences between v2.1 and all previous ones are massive, and the program will change the ease of conducting collateral research for all who use it.

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:

Tip: Finding how many times an ancestor married with census notes

When an ancestor marries multiple times there can often be a lot of confusion if you are unaware of more than one marriage. When tracing the lineage of a female ancestor it can mean the difference between finding her real maiden name and running into a brick wall. Census Notes were small notations census takers made to make counting various statistics later easier. Most of these are pretty useless, but occasionally there are notes that provide valuable information. I have been noticing on several different censuses that sometimes the census taker would note down the number of marriages the person has had. This isn't true for all censuses of course but it's certainly something to look out for.

The way the number of marriages is notated is a number after the "M" (standing for 'married') in the census sections about whether a person is single, married, widowed, or divorced. Here are some examples: