Will FamilyEcho support more fields in the future?

Question

Hi there, 

I'm trying to collaborate with another researcher who has sent me a GEDCOM, which I imported into FamilyEcho. However, I've recently made the unpleasant discovery that FamilyEcho does not support many of the fields in the GEDCOM. In particular, FamilyEcho does not handle the following:

Hebrew name 

Hebrew death date

Immigration

Note 1

Note 2

Note 3...etc.

The Notes field not being supported is a big problem for us as we make extensive use of those fields in our trees. FamilyEcho's Bio Notes field does not seem to be compatible with GEDCOM Notes in either direction - Bio Notes won't go into a GEDCOM (Edit after double-checking - I goofed. This is not correct; see my comment in the answers below), and Notes in a GEDCOM won't go into FamilyEcho. 

Also, any dates that are not precisely formatted as numbers - like "about January 13, 1900" or "after June 1, 1950" as opposed to "8 Feb 1984" are not getting imported either, as FamilyEcho, unlike, say, Ancestry, doesn't allow users to enter "About" or "Before" or "After" or anything else that isn't a number in date fields.

Are there plans to increase FamilyEcho's GEDCOM compatibility in the future by supporting more of these data fields? I realize the webapp is designed more for casual than power usage, but I would prefer to use FamilyEcho if possible because it is one of the few free genealogy programs that lives entirely in the cloud.

 

 

Answer 1

I would have imagined GEDCOM files would be standardized.

"Bio Notes won't go into a GEDCOM"

If that is the case I am going to be severely angry.  :P  Sorry I don't have any answers for you, though!

Comments

My apologies - I was mistaken. I was thinking I had tested this behavior months ago, but evidently I didn't know what to look for then (or maybe tried importing a .txt or something instead of a .ged).

I just tested by exporting my file from FamilyEcho to GEDCOM, then imported the GEDCOM into Gramps. Gramps indeed displayed Bio Notes under the Notes tab, so that claim of mine was incorrect. My collaborator is using an old version of Family Tree Maker which apparently creates Notes under a different data field - these show up in the Events tab, not the Notes tab, in Gramps (and they don't show up at all in FamilyEcho upon importing).

So I'm less panicked about my own data not going into a GEDCOM - but there's still the question over whether FamilyEcho will eventually support more fields that are common in other software.

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Phew that is a relief!!  Thanks for testing it, I appreciate it.  Hopefully they will add more fields in the future!