Working with data in a family history database can introduce errors. Pedigree Forge supports both real time warnings and also has an audit report, which can help to find and correct errors too.
As you navigate around the people in your file, some possible errors will be checked in real-time and show in the status bar. This are for the current person in the edit panel:
In the above example, Pedigree Forge has noted that the children of the current family aren’t in chronological order. You can then use the children table to sort them chronologically.
Some of the warnings are things that might be errors, but can sometimes happen. It is rare to find children born after a lady was in her mid-forties, but it does happen on occasions. Charles Darwin’s wife was 48 when their youngest son was born, as shown in the example below. If you click on the status bar warning, you can select to ignore the warning for that person going forward.
To run an audit over your the whole file, select “Audit and validation” from “Tools” on the menu bar.
This will add a tab to the list of content tabs, which are to the right of the editing panels:
At the simplest level, clicking on the “Refresh” button, on the Audit tab will run an audit of your file, with any warnings listed in the grid below.
Not all warnings will be an error; some things happen rarely, and so are more likely to be an error, or least need a big more work before accepting that they are correct.
The following audit has returned two warnings:
Double clicking on an item in the audit report list will take you to the correct record (and fact/event if applicable).
If we right-click on an item in the list, we are presented with a few options:
The first item is a warning because Charles Waring Darwin was born in 1856, when his mother was 48. This is quite old for a woman to have had a child, but did really happen in this case. We can therefore select “Ignore always for this record”. This will stop the audit warning from appearing again.
Caroline Sarah (born 1800) is listed after her brother, Erasmus, who was born in 1804. We can therefore sort the children, so they are in the correct order.
If we then click the “Refresh” button again, the audit warning will disappear.
If you have a large file, there might be too many warnings to process conveniently at once. In this case, you can use the filter options, to reduce the number of items records that are checked, and then do them in stages.
Clicking on the arrow next to “Filter Options” will show some boxes to allow customisation of who is included in an audit:
Use the “…” buttons to select a start and end (or one or the other) people to check. This is based on the order they appear in the lists when they appear (file order). You can also opt to see previously ignored warnings too.