Importing GEDCOM files

[John Rastall]

I have recently received a large GEDCOM file from a contact in the USA containing about 1400 people. It was generated by Family Tree Maker and it has given KKPro (and me) a bit of a headache! KKPro would not accept many of the entries and reported about 14,000 errors on completion of the import. I then tried to export to html to that I could browse quickly through in web format which I find easier for quickly flushing out errors and so on. Unfortunately, KKPro reported "I/O Error 123" and froze on me. I have no idea what this means but I had to Ctrl-Alt-Del to shut it down and regain control of my computer - it had completely frozen my screen! After trying this a few times with the same result, I decided to inspect the GEDCOM file. It is 5.6MB in size and came to over 3000 pages in Word, the only program I have which could open it. I found that Family Tree Maker had added things such as "Snr" or "Jnr" or "III" after the slash after the surname (my correspondent is American and they use these things) on the NAME line which KKPro doesn't. I guessed that this might be the problem so I manually checked the file to identify and fix all the rogue entries -- not a five minute job! Anyway, it did fix the problem and KKPro then imported the revised GEDCOM file and successfully exported to html.

Then I found another problem. The original file contains a number of names beginning "de" or "van" which my correspondent had entered sometimes with an initial capital letter and sometimes all lower case. KKPro maintained the difference which probably wouldn't be a problem within itself but it tripped over itself when exporting to html. The program compiled a list of the "De ~" names within the others beginning with D, then the Es, and so on, to those starting "Van ~" within the other Vs, and on to Z. Then it compiled the list of those beginning with "de ~" and then "van ~". This order was reflected in the surnlist.htm file. Unfortunately, the files snd.htm and snv.htm contining the lowercase list over-wrote those containing the upper case names and I can't access them!

I don't want to edit the GEDCOM file again so I guess I will have to seek out the offending names one at a time within KKPro and fix them there. But this is a serious "bug" which I really believe should be fixed at the earliest opportunity. It would be nice if the program didn't hang on "I/O Error 123" - whatever that is.

I am using KKPro 2.02 on Windows XP.

Cheers

[Dijkgraaf]

Yes it would be nice to see the ablity to enter more complex names such as
Title Firstnames PreferedName SurnamePrefix Surname SurnameSuffix
(Bolded items are the new ones)

I especially would like to see SurnamePrefix, as I have many names in my ancestory with "de, van de, van den, van der, 't" etc. as I'm Dutch.
At the moment I resort to putting the surname prefixes in the firstnames field after their firstnames, as I don't want the names sorted on the surname prefixes.

[Dijkgraaf]

I know that you can add the Prefix (for title), Surname Prefix and Suffix as custom fields, however this is rather clunky (as they are then in a seperate area of the form) rather than with the rest of the name.

[Dijkgraaf]

For the PreferedName their is actually a GEDCOM v5.5 tag of NICK, however that doesn't appear in the list of GEDCOM tags under NAME in K&K.
Could this be added?